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I’ve written recently about my upgrade to Vista, and i have to say, I’m disappointed. To be honest, I should have expected it given the exposure in the media and the professional press, but I always felt that it was maybe all too critical. Well, I can tell you that from my own experience, Vista is a frustrating OS to have as your main system!
One of the reasons I went to Vista was that I liked the look and feel – it’s a clear improvement over XP – but I get the impression that all this visual wizadry is at the expense of system performance. I have a 512Mb graphics card and 4Gb of main RAM, but my system is at best sluggish! 
This presents me with a dilema:
- Either I revert back to XP and stick with an unsatisfactory Microsoft environment, but which gives me the same, fully compatible office suite as I use at work, as well as my preferred development environment – Visual Studio;
- or I make the move to Linux as my main OS, but sacrifice my office suite (OpenOffice is great, but not 100% compatible – particularly when using graphics) and my development environment!
I’ve been looking more into Linux recently, and found that the UI is way better than Vista, so from this angle, the move would be beneficial, however, I can’t go for looks alone!
So my call goes out to you – my loyal readers. What would you do? How can I overcome my own objections and be free to move to Linux? How can I have my cake and eat it???!?
I look forward to your comments…. 
One of the most common questions that people these days ask me regarding their home PC’s is how to have it startup and go straight to the desktop. This used to be the only option, and when Microsoft did us the favour (!) of allowing us to have multiple accounts, very few people embraced this enhancement. Read more…
My desktop PC that I use for software development has been taking longer and longer to boot recently. It got to the stage that I could start it, go downstairs to make a coffee, come back upstairs with the coffee, and drink it before I could do anything useful with Windows. (OK, so I *know* that there’s an argument that trying to do anything useful with Windows is an exercise in futility, but that’s not the point of this post….!)
The moment that I’d been dreading over recent months finally came, when I couldn’t stand this startup rubbish any longer. It was time to reinstall my operating system!!!