I thought my next blog post would be announcing SubSonic 2.0.3 - and until late this morning thing were looking pretty good on that front. I know, it sounds like a lame way to spend the 4th of July, but sometimes real freedom is a quiet phone and an empty inbox. And since our "commander-in-chief" has continued to use the Constitution as toilet paper, I'm not feeling especially patriotic...
But instead of releasing 2.0.3, I'm rebuilding my dev box. For reasons I will probably never know, IIS decided to take a permanent holiday this morning and no amount of coaxing would bring it back. I attempted to remove and reinstall IIS, only to discover that once removed, it had no intention of going back. Fair enough, I'll do a repair install of the OS, just like I used to do when XP became completely FUBAR.
Well, in Vista you can't do that anymore. There is simply no option to reinstall core OS files short of a full reinstall. Ok then, I guess this means a full reinstall - it'll give me a chance to truly clean house. Well, during one of the many reboots in the process, the boot manager decided it was time to reshuffle my drive letters, turning my C:\ drive into my E:\ drive, an in so, refusing to boot back into the installer. Oh joy.
So I thought for a minute about what Vista has really done for me in the three months since I made a full commitment to it, and whether I really felt like fighting it anymore:
Positive Vista Contributions
- Nice eye candy
- A better task scheduler
- A services tab in task manager
- None of the features (like WinFS) that got me initially excited about it.
- Ability to run Halo 2.
Negative Vista Contributions
- Significantly slower file operations everywhere
- Mysterious file locking
- A complete lack of transparency into the inner workings of just about everything on my machine
- Beta quality video drivers six months after official release. Thanks nVidia!
- Bonus: Despite repeated to attempts to convince it otherwise, thinks every folder contains pictures thereby removing any useful information and replacing it with a slide show option. Surprisingly, .dll files don't render into nice 24-bit images.
And there it was: A choice as clear as daylight. Of course, thanks to the symbolic links that Vista creates across the file system as part of the virtualization model, this is not a straightforward process. Windows XP cannot delete the contents of the Windows directory, and you won't even make it to the initial reboot without a file copy failure. In retrospect, I probably should have just blown away my C:\ partition, but I chose the difficult route, which involved Ultimate Boot Disc and the manual resetting of permissions and ownership across several directories. But now I'm on my way, XP is installed, and I've commenced the laborious process of reinstalling all the applications I depend on.
It's funny - I don't feel like I've given up a damn thing. In fact, I'm actually excited to be back on XP - back to a fast, tried-and-true operating system that I control, without daily surprises. Goodbye Vista - I've got work to do and I don't have time for this bullshit. You're beautiful, but that's enough to sustain a relationship. Call me when you hit SP1.