Trade-Offs

It’s always nice to confirm something you suspected but weren’t absolutely convinced was true until one critical moment.  For me, it was rolling back from Vista to XP and than back to Vista.  Yes.  I actually did that.  Why?  Because of Nero.

Nero Vision to be more precise.  I installed 7.5 as recommended by Nero so it would be Vista “ready”.  It’s not.  Tried it on two separate Vista machines and Nero Vision 7.5 hangs horribly on both.  Usually right at the point where you pick “DVD Video” from the what to burn menu.  The downside was that I could no longer burn DVD movies (something I do often).  With all the gains in Vista, that one was tough to get used to.  SO I rolled back.

That was where I felt the wrath of legacy code, bubbling up like a case of beer in my belly and eating something like a pickel, which brings it all back up.

I got Nero Vision back in operation, but found some other “issues” that I simply could not live with:

• iTunes 7.x is God-awful slow on XP/SP2 and it kept nagging me about “incorrect audio configuration settings” that interfered with docking and ejecting my iPod.  Argh!!  iTunes 7.x works flawlessly on Vista.
• Almost every single app I use runs slower on XP.  Yes.  True.  I’m convinced so 100%.  Even things like copying files, unzipping large files, converting video and audio files, etc.  All of those chores are noticably slower on XP
• Running in limited-user mode DOES NOT WORK ON XP.  It simply does not.  It’s not Microsoft’s fault either, it’s shabby, faulty vendor development.
• IE7 on XP is buggy.  Even though it’s the one app on Vista that does not run faster than on XP, it’s more stable on Vista.
• FireFox 2.0 works great on Vista.  Faster than on XP

So, having swallowed that dreadful pill, I went “back” to Vista and I’m a happy guy now.  Happy so far anyway.  I can’t burn DVD’s with Nero still, but maybe they’ll post another update to fix that.  Maybe next week I’ll find something that angers me.  Then again, I’ve yet to find an OS that I truly “love”.  OS/2 was pretty close, but IBM blew that one.  Oh well.  No more Windows Fista jokes from me.