I've been running Vista as my main dev box for about 12 weeks now, and I couldn't be happier that SP1 is going to be rolling out soon.  In my opinion, it can't get here soon enough.  Vista, in my opinion, is just not mother-in-law-proof.  For the record, my laptop is rated as an overall 4.5 "experience index" (on a 1 to 5.9 scale)**, which is not too shabby.  A 4.5 (with 5.9 video scores) allows me to see all of the glassy UI Vista effects.  For argument's sake, I'm going to ignore my personal beef(s) with developing on Vista, and will discuss general interaction I've had with the OS.

Last week I had all sorts of slowdown issues that required me to download Process Monitor to chase down a rogue process that was eating my HDD I/O.  What was that process?  Windows Defender.  Defender decided to run a full HDD scan in the middle of the afternoon, despite the schedule being set to run in the middle of the night.  The result?  My laptop came to a screeching halt, barely allowing me to get at Task Manager to perform emergency shutdowns of my freshly edited VS code.  Awesome.

Then there was this kicker: I played IT-guy for my niece.  She was having issues with her relatively new, relatively fast Compaq/HP notebook, and when I took a peek at it I noticed how much crapware was installed.  Seemed like the perfect example for an FDISK with a fresh XP install.  So, as that computer was being wiped, I was using my Vista box to download all the latest drivers.  I thought this would be a time-saver, as the plan was to download it all, then burn it to a CD.  Boy was I wrong.  Downloads worked like a champ, but when I went to burn the CD (using the internal Vista DVD/CD burner), this is what Vista calculated:

No, I am not kidding.  No, I did not Photoshop this image.  17 items.  578 MB.  This wasn't the first "best guess", but rather 3 or 4 excruciating minutes into the 578 MB copy.  Let's do some math, shall we?  32,996 days = 2,850,854,400 seconds. 578MB/2.85B seconds = 0.20 bytes/second = 1.62 bits/second.

My circa-1980 Commodore 64 had a 14.4kbps modem that was 8,878 times faster than that.  You know what?  It felt like it.  I could nearly see the electrons moving. 

[**Note to Microsoft: fire the idiot that determined a 1.0 to 5.9 scale.  1 to 5.9??  What the heck?  Was this built by the same joker that decided 0 to 158 1/3 is a good passer rating?]