I upgraded to Windows Vista (from Windows XP) back in November, when I moved from a dual-core to a quad-core machine. I was less than pleased with Vista, for a number of reasons, but primarily because I found the Aero user interface enhancements more annoying than useful. That’s all pretty eye candy, but the few benefits it brought were not worth the 2 gigabyte footprint or the continual distraction. I turned off what I could in a few minutes of tinkering, but didn’t spend a lot of time trying to turn everything off.

And that dang machine was flaky! The system would become unresponsive for no apparent reason. Windows Explorer would lock up and even Task Manager wouldn’t come up. It got progressively worse until I was hitting the reset button a couple of times per day. Yahoo Messenger, for some reason, often seemed to cause the lock up. If Messenger lost its connection, it would try to re-connect, and sometimes that would cause the entire user interface to lock up. I still don’t understand how an application can bring down the whole operating system, but there you have it.

At one point I was getting a number of blue screen crashes (a few per week), so I down-clocked the machine (it had been slightly over-clocked) thinking that was the problem. Then I thought memory was the problem, so I spent a couple of nights running the Windows Memory Diagnostic (available on the Administrative Tools menu). That didn’t reveal any errors, either. I had pretty much decided that the problem was with the video driver (GeForce 8500 GT), but never tested it because at that point yet another new machine arrived: a Dell Precision 490 (used) with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a quad-core Xeon running at 2 gigahertz.

We’ve been running Windows Server 2008 on the servers here, and have been very happy with its performance and stability. Given the choice between Vista and Server 2008 on the desktop, there was no contest. I ran Server 2003 on a laptop development machine for two years and was extremely pleased with it–much more so than with Windows XP–and I expect to be much happier with Server 2008 than with Vista. One really nice thing is that the user interface is clean and lacking all those annoying Aero enhancements.

There are a few things you probably want to change in the default configuration of Server 2008 if you’re going to use it as a desktop development system. I’ve found several sites that talk about this, the best being Vijayshinva Karnure’s Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS. It’s only been a few days, but so far I’m really liking the switch.

I’ve also said goodbye to Firefox in favor of (gasp) Internet Explorer. I’m not especially fond of IE, but Firefox has been unreliable for over a year–ever since I installed it on Windows XP 64. The 32-bit version of Firefox tends to crash, hang, or do unexpected things when running on a 64-bit version of Windows. And since they aren’t planning a 64-bit Windows version any time soon, I’ll move on. I understand that there are third-party x64 builds, but those don’t have full plug-in support nor do they appear to have the same quality standards as the official Firefox builds.

If I get ambitious, I might give Opera a try. For the near term, IE will do. At the moment I’m more interested in getting my new Server 2008 machine fully configured with all the development tools and such. Changing machines takes so much longer than you think it will.