Yeah, so if you haven't heard, Vista comes out this week.

Don't get it.

I got a free copy of Vista Business for pretending to watch some really lame video presentations. Now, I know one should do a clean install, but let's face it, most people don't. So I cloned my drive and did an upgrade install. Which went ok, actually.

First off, we had no drivers for my HP Photosmart 7960. HP has no Vista drivers, but does have a method of making the computer think it's a Deskjet 5600. It's really stupid, but it works.

My Audigy needed drivers. Creative offers up really half assed beta drivers that yes, give you sound, but no EAX, no DirectSound support, and they would frequently cause the sound card to give off a horrid feedback and shut down till I rebooted. Nice job Creative.

The Beta drivers for the Video Card were ok.

But here is the deal...beta drivers? Just how long have you people had to get your crap together? It's not like Vista was a secret. You know, I upgraded to XP the second I could, and I had zero driver issues. This is insane for a launch.

I had to download and install the vista version of my anti virus. But at least it was there. It's not a beta. It's ready to go. I do think Bit Defender needs to make it clearer on their website that you have install the Vista Version, but you can figure it out, it's ok.

At any rate, Vista is pretty, and I have the hardware to run it. Only it's really not light on it's feet. Oh, programs run as fast as they did before, but little things are really sluggish. Installing drivers. Booting. Opening up a folder. XP is light on it's feet, Vista is a bit of a klutz. It's not a terrible but klutz, but I wouldn't waltz with it.

At any rate, after 24 hours of futzing with it, I reformatted the drive and went back to XP. Vista is slick, but it's a kludge, too. Part of that is Microsoft's fault, and I expect it will get better, fast. New OS's like this are a bit tempermental, and XP was really just a cleaning up of 2000 anyway, so most of the hard work was already done.

The biggest problem is really in the 3rd party. The driver support for Vista is not up to par at all yet, and even when it is, it's lousy. So, unless you are sure what you have will have no issues, I'd honestly wait a few months until that sorts itself out. Frankly, it's unacceptable that an operating system that was in beta forever, and worse, took a few months to go from Gold Master to store shelf, would not have better drivers available from the likes of HP and Creative and ATI and Nvidia and the like. People are going to get a terrible impression of Vista when they install it, and it's not going to be all the fault of Microsoft, I tell you what.

I'm disappointed, actually, because I love me a new OS. But I can't have my speakers screaming at me, my printer using odd color choices, or whatever.

So, keep that in mind.

You go have a day.