Why? Well for starters I can not remember a single blue screen during my time on XP. With Vista (Ultimate) that has changed dramatically and I have had, on one particular day, three seperate stop errors. That meant that at the blink of an eye the whole machine went bam! and I witnesses some cryptic messages in white text on a blue screen. The message also said something about memory being dumped to disk but even that seemed to fail. Needless to say is that any unsaved work was gone and I feel privileged that none of my files were corrupted. Thanks Vista. I think the stop error was somehow related to iTunes and maybe Apple has some blame to take here but the bigger picture seems to point to Vista as this problem was not the only one...
Sorenson Squeeze - it lost all my compression settings after the Vista upgrade. Reinstall it I hear you say. Trust me I tried but unfortunately the installer fails with a very descriptive error:
Error Code: -5004 : 0x80070005 Error Information: >SetupDLL\SetupDLL.cpp (1927) pAPP:Sorenson Squeeze PVENDOR:Sorenson Media, Inc. PGUID:88bfbe72-7e9c-4ded-af1d-1245ace3c213 $7.1.100.1248PAK @Windows (6000) BT_OTHER 0.0

So for now I am Stefan minus Squeeze. I cannot reinstall it on my Vista machine and I don't know why Sorenson tells me it should work.

Then there are the general daily annoyances which any Vista user can testify. For example I use a little backup tool called Handy Backup. Since my Vista upgrade I need to manually allow this to run *everytime* I boot up. It gets better: when I manually select the blocked startup program and click 'allow' it still won't run, oh no. Vista thinks (I presume) that I may have right clicked on a tiny little taskbat icon my mistake, then mistakenly opened the submenu and mistalenly clicked to run the blocked program. And because I'm such a noob I now have to face a blacked out screen via which I have to confirm that I am really sure that I want to run this program... Argh, I need an OS, not a nanny.
I got so annoying that I turned the whole security bollo**s off completely (the technical term for it is User Account Control) and that was not easy but a quick Googling and I was on my unsecure way. Of course it defeats the whole objective of making Windows more secure but quite frankly this is not an OS that can be used for Flash development - its relentless nagging and endless warning dialogues amount to a big old wrench in the gears of my daily work. Terrible. I'm not lying when I say that the experience is exactly like the one below...

Even with the security features enabled you will find yourself (after a few days) simply confirming any dialogue without even reading it properly. Who has time for that? I do not. Either the OS is secure enough to let me get on with my life or it is not in which case it's not my job to make it but that of the manufacturer...
When the OS you have personally installed denies you access to some of your own files then something is not right. If you need to confirm that you really want to open the Services panel after having double clicked its icon a split second earlier then something is not right. When you find yourself unable to revert to XP after a Vista upgrade then something is not right (I couldn't revert, I believe sometimes it can be done though - no, I haven't got time for a clean reinstall right now thank you very much).
I really really would have downgraded to XP if I could have done. That says something about Vista I guess. In fact I cannot think of a single feature that I find better in Vista... I see no productivity gain at all, quite the contrary. The whole machine appears slower than it used to - and that is after I have turned the search indexer off as it was premanently eating CPU and driving my hard disk crazy.
The search in Vista - apparently oh so great and much hyped - but not great enough as it could not find the term 'timer' across the entire directory structure of AS class files when told to search inside files. I guess Vista does not or can not search in AS files, I guess I will never know. Maybe I have forgotten to enable some super secret setting somewhere... Search Indexer is turned off now and that's that. I use Google Desktop instead because it works and always has done.

Final verdict: Vista sucks. I really gave it a good try but I can not live with it, honestly not. It seems to be the same old rubbish under the hood, like an old car that has been giving a respray but the rust is already pushing through again. More rust than ever before in fact. A bodged (if that's even english) repair job.

So what does one do? Well guess what, this is my first blog post written on my new MacBook Pro... And by the way, my chosen version of Windows in Parallels will be XP...

I told you it would be a rant!