Downgrade? or Upgrade?

As you may have known, we got our hands on a free copy of the Vista Home Basic upgrade installation disc a few weeks ago and I put it on our desktop pc while the Romgi was at work one day. I will agree that it makes Windows look a bit nicer, but since we had the lowliest of the lowest versions, not much was changed from XP - except that now almost all of our computer's thinking power was constantly being used.

The Romgi went out and bought new memory to double what was in the computer before, which meant that our upgrade was no longer free. It did speed things up, of course, but with all the stupid security popups and permissions problems, not to mention the continual delay caused by trying to delete files...I was losing my mind! Computers are not meant to be that slow. I realize this isn't a new desktop - the Romgi got it when we started college - but it ought to be able to function with 1GB of memory...

So today, when I was finally over my battle with the stomach flu, I read a lot of articles and forum posts about how to get rid of Vista. Unfortunately, there's no way to just get rid of the upgrade and go back to the pre-Vista computer. If you buy a computer that comes with Vista Business Edition already installed, the manufacturer may offer a free downgrade to XP, but there are no downgrade rights for Vista Home users. Microsoft says this is because they feel it would be extremely unlikely that a home user would have any reason to want to downgrade. (Don't they read the internet?!?)

That being the case, I copied all of our documents, music, photos, game files, etc., to the other two computers in our apartment. After the Romgi came home from class he went through the files on the desktop again to make sure I got everything important; then we crossed our fingers and completely wiped the hard drive clean. It seemed to go well, so we stuck in the XP installation cd and hoped for the best.

And now...it feels so nice! Like coming out of a hot shower after you've been camping. Ahhh. I have plainly confessed to the Romgi that it was my fault for installing Vista to begin with, and I am very sorry to have caused so much trouble; but on the whole, I think the computer is working better now that it has less (much less!) junk on it, whether in the form of useless programs or useless operating systems.

I do agree with many dissatisfied Vista customers, going back to XP is not really much of a downgrade. Maybe if I'd had a really cool version of Vista I would have seen a big improvement from XP, and maybe Microsoft is steadfastly working on the bugs, but I don't think I'll be interested in "upgrading" for quite some time.