Nothing fits better than that phrase.  After using Vista for several months I’ve reverted back to XP and quite happy with the decision.  Vista is everything I like visually and even a lot of the functionality but beyond that it’s flaming pile of dung.  I could have waited for SP1 or tried the release candidate but I’ll save that for my laptop.

The first thing I did while installing was remove UAC and the system ran very well.  I noticed it wasn’t quite as fast as XP but I traded it for the visually appealing look and how it functioned.  The honeymoon was shorter than Britney Spears first, then again maybe a little bit longer than that.  The slowdown continued to get worse, the application timeouts were numerous and WTH was Microsoft thinking with the search function?

The search is one of the worst concocted items with the new OS.  I’d do a search, it’d indicate that it could search faster if indexed (with my understanding of XP, I thought, sure!).  Eventually I started noticing my search process taking up HUGE chunks of memory.  I found where it stored the “indexing” and killed them and it restored some speed.  What’s odd is that the search function seems to have been built for a monkey.  It’s not that the XP built in feature is great (it doesn’t find a lot of items inside of a file) but it’s at least easy to click something like *.bmp, *.gif, *.jpg, etc. and return all the extensions I want.  I’m sure there is some other way to do it in Vista but why remove the simplicity that was in XP?  It was also a lot worse than XP when attempting to search within files (which is hard to do).  Regardless they need to overhaul the search.

The timeout on applications and even explorer are ridiculous.  I’m using an application such as Word 2003 and out of nowhere (and while typing with no apparent issues), it stops responding losing whatever I had done since the last save.  Worst is in graphic programs where you don’t save every minute and lose a crap load of work.  I’ve had issues where I’m browsing a network drive and suddenly Explorer just crashes with no signs of an issue.

Games kicked off slower and frame rates were significantly lower than on XP.  Anyone who says they’re running Vista and getting 100+ frames on an 8800GTS (as I have) running at high resolutions (which they rarely include their resolution) with high effects on games like UT3 are full of it.  It’s simply not happening or they’re leaving out that it’s at 800×600 or with dual cards (which I still suspect is not the case in terms of FPS).

Again, as opposed to a lot of others, I like what the OS is about but they did a piss poor job of implementation and optimization.   We’ll see how the release candidate of SP1 does on my laptop but unlike previous versions of Microsoft OSes, I have a feeling that I’ll not jump until potentially SP2 is released or I see some substantial increases on my laptop.