Anyone who’s travelled overseas, particularly to one of the popular pacific resort style destinations like Fiji, will hopefully understand where I’m coming from. A change of scenery (a new vista?) is great at first, but after a couple of weeks the reality soon sets in that you’re standing in the middle of a third-world country that’s being cheerfully hidden behind a tourist-friendly facade, and all you want to do is go home.

After several months of what I must admit has been a mostly positive relationship, I finally found myself looking at Windows Vista in much the same way, longing for the comfort of XP. So great was the feeling of homesickness, that I spent the better part of six hours last night, backing-up, reformatting, re-installing and restoring.

Now that I’m home in XP-land, I thought it worth a few minutes of reflection. After all, would I crave to return to my holiday destination the moment I got unpacked?

Firstly, the good times... There’s no denying that Vista is much easier on the eye. MS has really made an OS that’s aesthetically a pleasure to use. For someone who was brought up on DOS, and who still likes the clunky Windows 95-styled classic menus, Vista can be a little unsettling. I forced myself to do it the MS way and ultimately enjoyed the experience.

Stability is also a real plus. I agree with MS that in general terms Vista is an extremely stable OS. It appears to handle performing multiple tasks simultaneously better than XP (especially where I/O is concerned) and as a corporate OS I know that it will be a winner. While UAC (user account control) is little more than annoying for those who really know their way around a PC (the very first thing that I switched off), I’m sure it will stop many people from inadvertently damaging their setup.

While speed was never really a concern to me, it was obvious that Vista was eating a lot more resources than XP. My shiny new Athlon64 X2 6000+ and 4GB DDR-2 RAM were both appreciated (although 32-bit Vista only saw 3GB, but that’s a story for another time). Having experienced it on several machines now, I personally wouldn’t like to run it for an extended period on anything less than an entry-level Core2 DUO with 2GB RAM.

So where’s the problem you ask? My reason for moving back to XP will be trivial for most, but after a day of solid IT stuff, I like to unwind by playing computer games... that’s logical, isn’t it? Quite simply, Vista doesn’t handle the rigours of gaming particularly well... yet.

Essentially, MS has replaced big chunks of the OS, removing many of the interfaces that game programmers used to talk to the underlying hardware. Apparently, this has been done partly to introduce enhanced DRM capabilities (Digital Rights Management). Abstraction layers and compatibility modes take the place of things such as DirectSound, which cause many games to simply not play correctly. It’s important to note that new interfaces, such as OpenAL, will be used in new game titles, which should alleviate these issues, so it’s really just a case of the software taking time to catch up with the OS.

As an IT professional and techie at heart, the other thing I really didn’t like was the feeling that I was never quite in control of what my PC was doing. It’s a little like driving a new car, in comparison to an old Holden. If my trusty HZ Premier ever stopped working, I could confidently pop the bonnet, jiggle a few things and be on the road again. With a state-of-the-art microcomputer controlled vehicle of today, all the workings are hidden behind massive plastic covers, designed to only be touched by trained technicians armed with even more computers. Similarly, Vista hides all the grubby stuff from the user, as indeed it should.

Don’t be too surprised if this all sounds familiar. The same was true of the relationships between XP/2000, 2000/NT4 and 95/3.1 (can any of you remember back that far?). Vista is indeed a logical progression, and one that should be well received over time.

It's somewhere I'll surely visit on occasion, but I'm not moving there for good... at least not yet.