My problem with recommending Windows Vista is that many of its features are considered bugs by a good portion of the community. Doesn’t that say it all? No, this isn’t Windows bashing – it’s the bare-faced truth. Here’s TheDub’s legitimate experience, as emailed to me earlier today:

After using Windows Vista I find it hard to work on Windows XP again… there are just to many things I miss about Vista. I think Vista is a great operating system at heart but not going to lie it needs many improvements before it replaces the speed and stability of Windows XP.

I can’t disagree with any part of this statement, but what exactly are we trading speed and stability for? What’s more important than those two items? The true answers to these questions remain elusive. I could recommend that you download a “speed up” utility, but those programs seldom work as advertised (and some of them can actually decrease overall system performance). There really aren’t any Vista-specific tweaking tools out there, sadly – and yes, I already know about TweakVI.

I am having two issues with Windows Vista. One speed! Windows Vista seems horribly slow especially for me. I am a “power user” sometimes I am working with many programs at once and many files at once. Vista lags.. all the time! Another strange thing that I can’t explain is how much it access’s the hard disks. My hard disk is almost always going nuts even when just sitting on the desktop. The noise is not only annoying but just the idea of my computer is doing something I have no idea what is. It is also a performance drag. I have 2gb of RAM and a 2gb Flash Drive dedicated to ReadyBoost so I don’t think it is paging all the time. Any ideas? Or are there any performance tweaks you would recommend? I have done some research and found that windows is always making shadow copies of files and disabling that feature really is a performance boost. Also there is the famous ‘shut off the indexing service’ to increase speed but I don’t know if that will really help this.. any thoughts you could share with me and the others?

Windows Desktop Search may be the culprit – another “Wow” that’s more of a “Whoa.” That’s a feature, not a bug. If you want a performance tweak, move back to Windows XP. You’re not going to find massive performance gains with Windows Vista.

If your hard drive is close to full, think about archiving some of the things you don’t need – or buy a second hard drive (for documents, programs, etc.) if you don’t already have one. Telling you to buy a faster hard drive isn’t really a good answer, but it may be the only one (and that, itself, may not solve the problem of Windows Vista thrashing you senseless).

Turn off all your eye candy?

My second issue with Vista is sleep. Windows Vista goes to sleep once… thats it. The second time I shut the screen on my laptop it doesn’t go to sleep, shuts the screen off, annnd thats it. I have to power it down with the power button and start it back up to get back to my desktop… This doesn’t seem right at all.. ever heard of this issue?

Join the club. Watch my live stream with any regularity and you’ll see just how flaky Vista’s power management can be – especially in conjunction with USB devices. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not (and neither are you).

It’s much easier to blame the user than the hardware or software, don’t you think?

I am running Windows Vista Ultimate. Maybe my system simply isn’t strong enough for vista though I would like to think that is not the case, after all it came with home premium and stamped ultimate ready. It’s specs include a AMD Turion 64 x2 TL-50 (1.6ghz), 2GB Ram, ATI Xpress 1150 (this is the weak link in the system but impressive for integrated graphics), and a 5400RPM 160gb HD, I know that 5400 RPM is a slower drive but it is a laptop computer and it seems most laptops include this speed HD for power and heat issues.

If you’re expecting a portable system to deliver desktop-level performance, you’re… going to be waiting a long time. Sounds like you’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone, and are likely best served by Windows XP on that machine. Sorry.

I’m sure this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but… that’s just the way it is. If anybody recommended Vista over XP in your situation, I’d be surprised. Feel free to read what Tom’s Hardware had to say on the performance differences u can pore over the entire article, but Tom’s Hardware has an excellent summary on between Windows XP and Vista.