And add to this, “What happens if the WGA servers go down?” Could never happen, huh?

I do not watch high definition content on my computer either. I do download tv shows; my computer isn’t very comfortable for watching them though. Netgear has a neat device that would allow to show those files on my tv; that might be worth getting. I’m a little apprehensive about what I’m doing as I am violating someone’s copyright. I keep hoping the producers of these shows would just get with the program and make them available.

I mostly agree with your comments about hardware drivers. For past version changes, it doesn’t matter if it was major or minor; updating drivers for every thing you’ve shipped in the last 2 years can be a major undertaking. And no one is going to commit major resources to do it unit the product ships; Microsoft can and has made last minute changes that have invalidated all previous work. I do not like the practice; I just understand it.

I suspect these things bother me less than some folks because I don’t use my computer to watch movies. So most of what I experience with Vista relates to the user interface and security features. I’m perhaps a little odd in that I appreciate the value of the extra security, including UAC. I feel these features are long overdue, and don’t find the prompts for privilege elevation to be terribly intrusive. Mind you, I use Linux GUIs like KDE and Gnome regularly, and am used to the “root privileges required” prompts from that environment. One thing that these prompts clearly reinforce for me is the fact that there are far too many programs for Windows, particularly games, that require elevated privileges simply to run. That is poor design on the part of the software authors: they’ve gotten used to having full and complete control of the machine. This is particularly true of the copy protection schemes used by these games, which try to run as core parts of the OS to block or encrypt access to the CD/DVD drive. That is really pretty scary stuff- what is a game doing taking over low level device drivers?

As for the hardware developers…there hasn’t been a major change in Windows driver requirements for five or six years. The hardware manufacturers had a couple of years while Vista was in beta to comply with the new driver architecture. Microsoft has been saying for years that over 80% of the customer problems they receive are ultimately traced to incorrect or badly written hardware device drivers. I can attest to this myself: I’ve been in server and workstation support for a couple of decades, and have observed first hand how hardware drivers can mis-behave. The new driver architecture in Vista is supposed to limit the damage a poorly developed driver can cause. I guess I’m a little less sympathetic towards the hardware companies than I could be.

Despite the fact that I like many aspects of Vista, I can’t say I’d recommend someone who is happily using XP should upgrade. I’ve been telling my friends and family that there is no real reason to upgrade, and lots of reasons not to. My suggestion to them is to upgrade when they buy a new computer, unless or until there is something hardware or software wise that they really want that only works under Vista. This is a big difference from the Windows 95 to Windows XP transition: I was strongly recommending folks upgrade that time.

So far, I dislike Vista. But I didn’t like XP when it was first out and now I prefer it. My problem with Vista is fundamental — too much of it’s core was designed to protect interests other than mine! With XP, my complaint was with product activation and, later, with Windows Guinuine Advantage. With WGA, it cannot be designed well enough to see the Microsoft sticker on the box that says I have a license to run this OS. To me, that trumps anything it finds scanning the inside! Vista goes much further trying to make sure I have a license for data files. Way too far.

I’m not sure that your observation shows ATI isn’t putting effort into dealing with problems; it probably only shows they are spread thin dealing with a host of problems this new OS is providing. I have hated that every version of Windows requires all new drivers but I do think Microsoft had a sufficient reason with Vista — provided they were honost about it.

I haven’t tried installing XP on this particular machine. My suspicion is that it would work (I.E.: that the problems with standby and the ASUS/ATI RAID resulting in massive disk corruption would not occur on XP), particularly if I used the 32 bit version of XP. I should probably give it a try, though.

I also haven’t tried the 32 bit version of Vista. Many of the problems I’ve encountered seem to originate with the combination of the 64 bit address space and 4 GB of RAM as much as with Vista itself. It would be interesting to see if even simply changing to the 32 bit version of Vista resolved the standby disk corruption problem.

I like Vista. But it seems that a lot of the hardware developers really have had a hard time making their drivers work well with it, particularly with the 64 bit version (which is what I’m using). When I look at the Asus and ATI drivers for Vista, specifically the Southbridge (SB600) drivers for ATI’s RAID controller, I see that they haven’t been updated since January. This suggests to me that they aren’t really putting much effort into dealing with the problems, either.

I’m curious if you have tried your setup with XP? I have not done much with Vista and stories such as yours make me even more reluctant to try. But I like to be fair; Vista may or may not be the problem; it’s just suspect #1!