I recently wiped the hard drive on my Lenovo X60 tablet and restored its original contents, reverting from Vista to Windows XP in the process. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like Vista. There are a lot of nice things about it, including the “Aero” look (yes, I like it), the numerous improvements to the Explorer windows, the new features for pen-based input, and the photo-viewer thing.
Unfortunately, though, it demands too much of the host computer. The machine isn’t a slouch; it’s less than a year old, rated “Vista-ready”, and has a dual-core CPU. But the contrast–particularly now that I’ve reverted to XP–is fairly dramatic. I get a lot more battery time running under XP, the machine goes in and out of standby much more quickly, file-copy operations happen more rapidly, .zip files uncompress much more quickly, and even the Start menu is faster. In other words, performance characteristics that are particularly relevant to a laptop are definitely degraded by Vista. In the end, longer battery life and greater responsiveness are more important to me than Vista’s benefits.
So, the tablet will run XP for the foreseeable future. Eventually I’ll try Vista on my desktop again, but I’ll probably wait until SP1 is released.
