So, you had not option but to upgrade to Vista, Xp is not been sold any more.
I don’t want to be the one to tell you that Windows Vista is the less productive operating system for developers. Don’t get me wrong, I love Vista and I love it having it at home for the wife’s laptop of the kids computer to get to Play House Disney to play with those awesome flash games. Now when using it for developing software, you find yourself less productive, as you are waiting most of the time for the operating system to stop spinning the blue wheel or the hard disk. Visual Studio 2005/2008 and Vista means hours of endless waiting.
What can you do? Complain as I do all the time or start finding the way to speed up the system. There are little things that you can do, as purchasing a USB ReadyBoot with at least twice the size as you computer RAM, more than 1 year ago, I wrote a post about it. It may help a little. Disabling a few startup applications will save you RAM. However the whole experience of Vista is all about the look and feel. I personally prefer to drastically improve the speed by disabling the look and feel of Vista. Go to “performance options” and select “Best Performance”.
From now on, your Vista computer will look just like Windows 2003. I really hope that you like that bare bones look, as the computer will run a much faster opening and closing applications as well as using the windows explorer.
If you find better ways to speed up your Windows Vista and keeping your Aero look, please let me know, as I miss it terribly but I feel that I do not have to wait anymore for the computer to finish spinning.
Cheers
Al