I finally got too fed up working with a crippled PC and installed the Windows Vista Beta 2 on my laptop. It looks really nice, although slightly slow. I connected my camera and, lo and behold, the Picture import works flawlessly, creating a separate folder per session, the Vista Photo browser and editor remind me a lot of Google’s Picasa. Internet Explorer 7 has tabbed browsing at last, and seemed quite stable and robust. In all, I was quite happy to have a working system again.
vista performance: I'm a '2'

But then I connected my iPod nano. The drivers loaded automatically so that felt normal. But ever since, my IE hasn’t worked anymore. It starts up, takes 100% CPU and does nothing useful. Every time I connect my camera, the Windows Explorer crashes. I can manually start up the Picture importer, sure, but for a system with almost no applications installed, that feels wrong. I get warnings saying applications and/or drivers crash, and that might be fixed in the next ‘Customer Release’.

My patience with poorly working computers being at an all-time low, I just popped in the Acer recovery system, and am installing Windows XP again. I’ll gladly try Vista once it’s out of beta, and when I have a more powerful system. For now, I need a dependable laptop.