My “Vista Experience” started roughly after Beta 2 was released. We received the DVD via our Partners program, and as we had a spare laptop lying around at the time, put Vista to the test. It was a very brief test, but what did come out of it was that it was going to make my day job ( being a programmer) alot faster. :-)

So around 1 month later, Vista RC1 was released, and after reading Paul Thurrot’s excellent site about Vista and RC1, I decided to download the beast (at a hefty 3.2GB, which by the way, on our 4mb ADSL line took roughly 2.5 hours!). I then installed it on my home machine, and boy has Vista improved from Beta to RC1. All my drivers were automatically installed, Aero was working beautifully, and Vista really looked like a perfect upgrade to Windows XP.

Well, that was until I actually started to need it to work, and not just sit there and look pretty. The only driver that didn’t install was my soundcard, which I must say was at least 6 years old. I bought a new Genius 5.1 Channel PCI Sound Card, which didn’t install on Vista either. I even contacted Genius support, who told me there currently were no Vista drivers. :-( Strike 1.

Last night, my girlfriend needed to print some documents, and low and behold, my HP deskjet 3745 printer, which is just over a year old, also didn’t install! Again I contacted HP support, and they too didn’t have Vista drivers, but said that they were working on them. Strike 2.

The final nail in this beast’s coffin, was the way it handled the printing. My girlfriend had tried to install the printer herself, and had just choosen the printer out of their list of supported printers, but the problem was that it was hooked up to the LPT1 port, and not USB. You try deleting a printer, when it has a document waiting to print. It just doesn’t work pal. I have tried to cancel, re-cancel, pause, restart, remove, absolutely everything to both the “waiting” document, and the printer. It just has a caption next to it saying “busy deleting“. After a couple of restarts, it still is busy. Strike 3.

Vista will be an awesome operating system, but the lesson learnt here is, don’t install a Beta OS no matter what. Not all devices are supported yet, some installation files won’t run, as well as support is at a bare minimum. So my home machine is going under the knife, once again, to be put out of its misery, and the legend of XP will make it’s appearance on my screen once again.

I know the Linux and Mac okes are laughing right now, saying “dude, just get a real OS“, but folks, its simple decision for me. Money is where Microsoft lies. Or is it Microsoft is where the money lies?