I'd heard plenty of these stories but I'd always rolled my eyes before when hearing people complaining about Vista and saying they were going back to XP. But over the holidays I got to thinking about it and realized I had a lot of issues in Vista that could be resolved by going back to XP.

That said, I really like Vista. The operating system may not seem drastically different from XP, but I quickly got used to a lot of its niceties. Having smart pre-fetching meant Windows knew I frequently launch Firefox and would be ready to bring it back into memory quickly after I closed it. Consequently the load time was dramatically reduced. The start menu's search feature was fantastic in pulling up programs quickly, and additions like Start++ meant I could even pull up web shortcuts and queries like "weather 60622" for Chicago weather right in the Start menu itself. And making backups of your files and settings in Vista is incredibly simple with their backup program that's built-in. I had stopped using Aero pretty early on but the UI still looked nicer and things were more convenient than XP in a lot of ways. So why go back to XP?

I'm going back mostly due to lack of hardware support and some bugs that still haven't been ironed out. In no particular order:

• The video card quickly overheats while playing games (to the point where things went bluescreen...seems like a lot of Dell E1705 owners with NVidia cards are too familiar with this, and there haven't been updated drivers that might resolve the problem)
• The external 5.1 sound card (Creative Sound Blaster 24-bit USB) which worked perfectly in XP took forever to release a Vista driver, and it causes a lot of distortion issues during video playback (hisses and pops)
• Vista would drop the wireless network connection randomly and frequently, even without use of Standby or Hibernate (the only resolution to recover the network was restarting...trying to do anything else resulted in everything becoming sluggish)
• Fan/temperature control programs wouldn't run in Vista because they aren't compatible or don't have signed drivers...some known workarounds for the signed driver check stopped working after an update - this could have resolved my video card overheating issue otherwise

Considering things worked pretty flawlessly in XP previously, it just made too much sense to revert, at least until these issues have time to get ironed out.

*It should be noted I was using 64-bit Vista, which could have meant some increased compatibility issues versus 32-bit.