Posted 02/10/2008 at 02:53:01pm

I'm currently downgrading my wife's PC (Acer Aspire E380, 2GB RAM 300GB SATA Drive, AMD Athalon 64 X2 dual-core, nVidia nForce Chipset, Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 video card) from Vista Home Premium down to XP Pro. This was a "designed for Vista" system purchased direct from the manufacturer with Vista pre-installed. Originally, it was slower than I'd expected, but I've seen the progressive slowdowns, system instability and general suckiness the others on this thread have observed. It's now effectively unusable as a system. I dread the endless "a windows component has stopped working. Report this to Microsoft?" prompts. I've been in IT for over a decade, so I'm not making noob mistakes. There's something SERIOUSLY wrong with Vista. This system has no spyware, no virii, no power problems, no HDD problems on the box (checked for all of those), is running current chip set and video drivers from nVidia, and it's still god awful. Vista just stinks like week-old Limburger left in the August sun. I've heard it said that "Vista is the Windows ME" of the current generation, and I believe it. I'm going to downgrade this box to XP, and get my "new OS jones" by playing with Ubuntu and the MacOSx86 project instead. Horrible, nasty, slow, buggy experience to date. I can't believe Microsoft charges the retail prices they do for Vista: at this point, I think I've lost several times the purchase price of Vista in lost productivity. -neverchex