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ME, Two? The Sins of Windows Vista

April 16th, 2008

One year ago today I was happily using Windows Vista. I had even written a few times on this very blog hyar that all the alarmist bullshit being flung around about how Vista eats up all your computer’s resources and is so full of DRM it won’t even let you play a CD unless you have a signed and notarized affidavit from the copyright holder was all just that: bullshit. Last year at this time, the only problems I was running into with Windows Vista were application incompatibilities…but you just expect that kind of thing to happen when a new OS is released. I did notice, however, that a lot of the early complaints about Windows Vista were coming from audio enthusiasts and computer-based musicians, who were mentioning all manner of driver problems. Creative and M-Audio were the two companies receiving the most criticism concerning driver problems, but the beta driver I was using to make my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum work under Vista didn’t seem to be giving me any problems….

It is now one year later. On Monday, I wiped Windows Vista off of my computer and replaced it with the default installation of Windows XP that had come with it. It took that particular copy of XP about two hours to download all the hundreds upon hundreds of updates that it needed to get caught up, but once it was fully updated and I’d spent a few more hours reinstalling all my software and copying my data back from its temporary exile on an external hard-drive, I’m happy to say that I am rockin’ and rollin’ (and bloggin’ and cussin’) more effectively than ever once more.

“So, Pegritz?” you ask. “What finally killed your love of Vista? I mean, just a few months ago you were still saying that it was a perfectly serviceable OS and that the many people calling it a waste of time and a major mistake for Microsoft were completely full of shit. So, what gives? Did you catch Vista doin’ your girlfriend or something?”

OK, then—here’s your answer.

Let me begin by reiterating a few things I’ve said a few times about Windows Vista. First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS from a usability point of view: despite a lot of bitching and moaning about “Oh, they moved my Command Line shortcut! Those horrible bastards!”, the GUI is no more nor less accessible than that of Windows XP. In fact, I prefer it a lot to XP. Not only is it better looking, but simple things like the list of “favorite” folders visible in every Explorer window makes it so easy to keep data nicely organized by keeping all your most-used folders a single click away. It doesn’t take six video cards, each with a gig of memory apiece, to run Aero with full transparency effects. Vista did not run one bit slower than XP on my machine, and actually started up faster. Finally, I never once ran into any form of DRM- or protected-media-related problems because I do not own or use any DRM-encumbered media, period.

So what’s so wrong with the OS that I don’t want to use it anymore? Let’s see:

SIN 1: AUDIO.

The first and most serious problem with Windows Vista is entirely related to audio. You think inferior NVIDIA drivers caused a lot of Vista crashes? You should see Creative’s track record. To put it mildly, audio in Windows Vista sucks. Big time. Though Creative’s beta Vista drivers for my SoundBlaster X-Fi worked just fine, their official Vista drivers are completely nonfunctional. They would work for anywhere between five and twenty minutes before crashing with a horrific !!!SQUEIIEIEIENK!!! that nearly destroyed my speakers and scared me so badly a number of times I nearly shat my pants. I would then have to reboot the damned system to enjoy another five-to-twenty minutes of good sound before OHMYCHRISTWHATTHEFUCKWASTHATHORRIDSCREECH?!!?! Oh. It was Creative’s useless fucking drivers blooching again. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Creative has issued at least five, or maybe more, revisions to their Vista X-Fi drivers. Guess what? Not a single one of them worked with my X-Fi. Not one. I attempted to ask what the hell was going on at Creative on their discussion boards, but never received a reply of any sort. I finally discarded the X-Fi card after Creative pulled the ultimate boner by asking a fan who actually made functioning Vista drivers for the X-Fi to cease and desist. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never own another Creative product.

I eventually purchased an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio system because it was portable (it connects via any plain ol’ USB port), it was much higher-quality than the X-Fi, and it featured a number of inputs to let me record live instruments into my computer. Of course, the reputation of M-Audio’s Vista drivers is not much better than Creative’s, but the MobilePre USB came highly recommended and, even better, was cheaper than any other audio solution. In fact, it was so cheap I even could afford to purchase two studio-quality monitors to go with it! When I brought it home, I downloaded the Vista drivers from M-Audio’s website, installed them, and plugged the MobilePre in. Worked like a charm. Until, that is, I had to reboot the computer for an unrelated issue a few days later. Vista would not recognize the device. I had to uninstall and re-install the driver, and then it worked again. Great, I thought, I’m gonna have to do this every time I reboot the damned machine? I contacted M-Audio to ask about that. Their answer: All of our Vista drivers are betas (STILL?! After the fucking OS has been in the marketplace for over a year?), and, besides, none of them support Vista SP1 yet.

Wait a second. As far as I know, Vista Service Pack 1 has nothing at all to do with the OS’s audio system. Why the driver would work under Vista but not Vista SP1 is completely beyond me but, hey, I’m not a programmer. Either M-Audio is incredibly lax when it comes to writing drivers, or Vista’s new audio subsystem is harder to parse than a Klingon translation of Finnegans Wake.

Audio hardware under Vista was not my only cause of grief, however. Audio software was even worse. Cakewalk Sonar was the first (and, to my knowledge, still the only) major DAW that released a version capable of running under Vista…but “capable of running under Vista” and “running well under Vista” are too completely different things. Fortunately, my alltime favorite audio workstation, Renoise, worked just fine under Vista…provided that I had User Account Control shut down completely. For some reason, none of my VST plugins would work on Vista if UAC was turned on (as, by default, it is). Needless to say, UAC was turned off immediately and never turned back on. I have no need for a goddamned operating system to ask me again and again and again if I’m sure I want to copy something.

Ultimately, though, between hardware problems and software problems—neither of which are present in XP—I finally decided that it was time for Vista to go. One of my primary uses of this computer, after all, is music production. It’s why I bought this particular machine in the first place: it had plenty of memory and a super-fast dual-core processor so I could run lots of effects! But…with Vista, it just got to a point where I do that anymore.

SIN 2: WEIRD INSTABILITY.

ANY pre-SP1 Microsoft OS has problems, because Microsoft always, always rushes stuff out the door before it’s actually ready. Considering it took five years and extensive beta testing to get Vista ready, though, you’d think the bugs would’ve been fewer. Nonetheless, they were there. But no big deal. Bugs happen, and after a month or two of working with Vista, I’d grown to know those bugs pretty well. Subsequent Windows updates even eliminated a great deal of them.

Yet…Vista was always a shaky system, regardless. Every now and again, it would do something extraordinarily weird—so weird that I could never be sure whether the problem was a hiccup in the OS, a user error, or some kind of demonic possession. For instance, every now and then I’d get what I took to calling a “sour boot”: for whatever reason, Vista would boot improperly—certain startup programs wouldn’t start up, certain services wouldn’t start, and Vista would then either run very slow, its processor usage would spike at odd times, it memory usage would go through the roof, or the OS became next to unresponsive. One time, when I got a “sour boot” (just a few weeks ago), I attempted to open Firefox 3 beta 4. It took twelve minutes for Firefox to load. I know I keep a lot of tabs open, but DAMN! That’s a little excessive.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the many times my temperamental audio player, J. River Media Jukebox, suddenly stopped working or played mp3s backwards.

The only way to get Vista back to working normally was to reboot and hope I didn’t get another “sour boot.” At first, I used to get them only once in a blue moon. By January, though, I was getting “sour boots” at least one in ten times. By March, it was happening almost every other time I restarted the damn machine. This, along with a few other issues, was something I was hoping SP1 would get rid of. But it didn’t. Which brings me to Sin Numero Tres:

SIN 3: SP1 MADE EVERYTHING WORSE.

I remember fondly when Windows XP SP1 was released. I didn’t really know what a “Service Pack” even was, then (I don’t remember there being Service Packs for Windows 98 or ME), but I installed it and…Windows XP just kept working like it always did. Windows SP2, on the other hand, did show some marked improvements in the system. Needless to say, I was pretty hyped for the release of Vista SP1, which I figured would solve a lot of the various “rushed-to-market” bugs and issues. I should’ve known something was up when Microsoft kept pushing the release of SP1 back further and further and further….Finally, though, it arrived, and I installed it.

The number of odd instabilities—random program freezes (that would last up to two minutes before the program would just come back to life), crashes, strange error windows, and, of course, even more audio problems—that had been making the OS more and more annoying to use in the past few months TRIPLED. It was like SP1 literally made the OS more unstable than ever before.

One of the great Vista irritants that I was hoping and praying Vista SP1 would correct would be the interminable file-copy or file-moving times. I frequently move large amounts of data from one external drive to another (for example, when I’m backing up my sample library or all the music I’ve composed). Try moving 15 gigs of data with pre-SP1 Vista. Oh, look at that: the little copy windows is telling me that it will take 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of files. “Oh, pshaw,” you think, “it can’t take that long. XP used to give weird copy-time numbers too.” But look at that…it really did take Vista 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of data. This was a well-known Vista headache and SP1 promised to fix it.

Well, it didn’t. In fact, as I was moving all my digital photos and documents to a safe external drive prior to wiping Vista out and replacing XP, it took nearly four hours to move 69GB of data. I guess that fix wasn’t actually included in SP1.

Regardless of the copy-time issue, the sheer frequency of instabilities and problems increased noticeably after SP1 was installed. Thank the Other Gods I didn’t have any problems installing SP1, as many others did…but, unfortunately, though SP1 installed successfully, it only seemed to make things worse.

SIN 4: GETTING PROGRESSIVELY WORSE INSTEAD OF BETTER.

The final sin of Windows Vista is sort of a metasin, being a sin comprised, in part, of all previous sins. When I first upgraded my old computer to Windows XP way back in 2001 or ‘02, I noticed a few bugs and problems here and there in XP that Windows 98 didn’t have. Regardless, XP was a HUGE improvement over 98, and a VAST improvement over Windows ME. As time went on and Microsoft added hotfixes and patches to the OS, its performance got better and better. Today, after greater than half a decade of refinement, Windows XP is a tank. Everything runs just fine on it, and weird problems are rare.

I expected the same experience from Windows Vista. Actually, I even expected it to be a little worse with Vista, because the difference between Vista and XP was so much greater than the difference between XP and Win 98/ME. Nonetheless, when I first installed Vista, I was impressed: it really ran pretty well, and the various audio and application problems I experienced with it would eventually vanish as better drivers were produced, Vista-compatibility issues were worked out. That’s just how it went with XP, after all!

But…no. Rather than getting better, as the months wore on, my Vista experience grew progressively worse. Applications seemed to develop more problems. Hell, I couldn’t even get the Beta Version of Internet Explorer 8 to install on the damn thing: it would copy all files and finish the installation, but the second I clicked on the IE button to open the browser the program would instantly crash.

The file-copying problem got worse and worse.

I even began to have trouble with Renoise—the most trouble-free piece of software I’ve ever owned! I would click on the Samples folder to access my audio files…and every single hard-drive attached to my system, either internally or via USB or Firewire, would grind and grind and grind for about three minutes before the list of sample folders would finally appear. Renoise never did that on XP! In fact…Renoise had never done that on Vista, either. Until I installed SP1.

A lot of people have been comparing Windows Vista to Windows ME, the strange, buggy, half-assed successor to Windows 98 that generally stands beside Windows Bob in the Microsoft Hall of Shame. I used to laugh at such comparisons. ME was a thousand times buggier than Vista, and its performance actually worsened as time went on. In fact, one of my friends at Laurel Computers in Uniontown once told me that the only way to keep ME running okay was the completely reinstall it every two to three months.

It didn’t strike me until Monday, when I was thinking about reinstalling Windows Vista again to get rid of SP1 that…I had reinstalled Windows Vista at least four times, every two to three months. That was the only way I’d managed to keep it running smoothly. By the end of that two/three-month grace period, something weird would happen that would kill the OS’s effectiveness and then I’d have to reinstall it.

Wow. Could those comparisons actually be right? Is Windows Vista merely ME 2?

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t have a test machine anymore that I can install Vista onto to see how it works on a different computer, so I can’t independently verify that. Perhaps someone reading this would like to let me know about his or her experiences with Vista. Are you experienced “ME Two” behavior, or has it been smooth sailing from Day One? Inquiring nerds want to know!

But anyway, there you have it: the reasons why I gave Vista the boot. I have been running all of my software just fine on XP these last few days, and haven’t discovered any discernible problems. None of the weirdness I experienced in Vista is happening under XP. The problem obviously lay with the OS, and not with my hardware (which I was actually beginning to suspect).

The question now stands: Will I ever return to Vista?

Not any time soon. Eventually, I would really like to, because, quite frankly, I found Vista’s GUI to be perfect to my computer usage style and I liked a lot of Vista’s features. Vista will, eventually, I hope, prove to be a worthy successor to XP…but until the day comes that it can demonstrate the same stability and lack of weirdness that XP actually displayed from Day One, my Vista installation DVD will be tucked in the back of my software shelf, next to an ancient set of Castle Wolfenstein floppies that I keep for sentimentality’s sake and the pencil sharpener I haven’t used in fifteen years.

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