I recently acquired a new machine, which has the following specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
3 GB 800mhz DDR2 RAM
Sapphire ATI X1550 512MB PCI-E XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS 512MB PCI-E
WD 500 GB SATA II
WD 250 GB SATA (I)

The machine came with Windows Vista Home Premium, and almost as a reflex, I removed it immediately in favor of Ubuntu. However, during my partitioning, I decided leave a couple NTFS partitions for a Vista reinstallation — one NTFS partition for Vista itself, and another so that files could be shared between OS’s. Ubuntu of course has no issue mounting NTFS drives, while Vista, of course, does nothing but…

Vista looks pretty, but I can sense that it’s just fancy dressing over total fugliness. Even on a machine with specs as impressive as this one, it hiccups and momentarily freezes, which is ridiculous.

Vista is also a hard drive hog. As a student I have access to some software packages provided by my university — included in this bundle are Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 — which I downloaded and installed, along with Firefox, video drivers, and that’s it. Twenty-five gigs, people. Twenty-five gigs! I’m sure that some of this is due to system restore, but system restore is on by default, so this is what most people are going to endure. Plus it’s Windows, so you need system restore.

Oh, did I mention that my network drivers magically uninstalled at one point? Yeah, and system restore didn’t fix it, either. Nope, that was fantastic.

My belief (or hope) is that Vista will turn into Windows ME (remember that?) The next version will hopefully be more like what XP became after 98Se. Of course what will I care? Booting back into Ubuntu…