I’ve been kicking around Beta 2 of Vista for a few weeks now.

Now that this beta includes video drivers that support the workstation in the

TechRepublic Test Lab, it’s been a much more enjoyable experience.  It still


leaves much to be desired, but Microsoft still has a few months left before

it pushes the shipping date back again…. Er ah… 

I mean work the bugs out.

I came very close to writing another blog complaining about

disappointment I’ve had with Vista’s performance on that PC.  The computer is lightning fast when running

XP, but is a dog under Vista.  And I’ve

been able to get many


Vista features running under XP by using third party and Microsoft tools.

So what made me decide to NOT go on a Vista Performance

Rant?  Ed Bott.  Specifically a blog that Ed Bott posted on

ZDNet a few months ago that pointed out, quite rightly, that every version of Windows has been a


bloated pig.

It’s not Microsoft bashing by any means. Think about any

version of Windows – Windows 1.0 thru XP. Whenever the operating system first

shipped, you would hear major complaints about what a dog it was. A couple of

hardware generations later, and then the operating system would become

tolerable. It was just a matter of waiting until Intel caught up with Microsoft.

Naturally, this relationship always created the appearance of

collusion. The moniker “Wintel” has long been associated with the

Microsoft/Intel relationship because the apparent symbiotic relationship between

the two.

So? What do we do? One of two things as far as I can tell. First,

we can wait until we finally get Quad Core CPUs from Intel and AMD. Secondly,

we can lobby Microsoft that when they’re creating new operating systems that

they allow programmers to only use 486-based PCs. Then maybe we’d get something

tolerable.