Windows Vista, Not Worth The Trouble

I don’t even know why I bothered wasting my time with Vista. First, their download process just plain sucked (apparently, it’s hosted by the poeple at Akamai) and took me nearly 2 days to download the 4GiB+ DVD image. Second, it’s Windows.

I installed Vista on a completely separate drive thinking it would install it’s boot manager on that drive. WRONG. It grabs info from the BIOS to determin which drive is first in the boot priority. Vista wiped out my Grub installation. That’s easy to fix, not a big issue. At least it was smart enough to find my XP installation and list it in it’s non-backwards-compatible boot manager.

At initial boot with no other applications open, Vista manages to suck up well over 500MB of memory. Why? I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the fancy-pants Aero GUI. I created a second user (for the wifey) and had them both logged in (again, no other applications open, just the OS). Vista managed to suck up 1.01GB of ram. A GIG! That’s ridiculous.

OK, enough of this. I’m getting rid of it. Now my problem is, I need to restore the XP boot manager so I can get things back to normal (with Grub as my boot loader). After searching for about 10 minutes I found some information on how to uninstall (if you will) Vista.

• Boot into XP and run c:\boot\fixntfs -xp
  Didn’t work.
• Boot into XP and run \Boot\bootsect /nt52 on the Vista DVD
  Can’t do this. I installed Vista 64. Can’t run 64bit applications on a 32bit OS
• Boot the XP CD-ROM and start the Rcovery Console
  Can’t boot the XP CD-ROM. Don’t know why. Other bootable CDs worked (Gentoo Live CD, Vista DVD)
• Boot into Vista and run the \Boot\bootsect /nt52 on the Vista DVD
  This actually worked. I had to use the /F option to force the unmount of the drive, but it got me back to the happy little dual boot system I had before this debacle started.

Crappy OS aside, Vista is nothing more than a OS X wannabe clone that sucks up way too much memory. I realize it’s still in beta, but using 1GB of ram for the OS is just a little bit silly.

I’ll stick to my trusty Arch installation on that machine. I’ll stick even more to my newly acquired 15” MacBook Pro and let the wife have whatever OS she chooses on that machine.