I wasted most of my day with Windows Vista SP1 yesterday and ended up wiping it out and installing XP. I spent ages updating a fresh Vista install (had to reboot about 15 times after each windows update), installing and updating Visual Studio 2008 Team System and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. Here is my rant:

• Vista was never designed for multi-tasking.
  • It’s dog slow even on my 3GB Ram, Intel C2D machine.
  • Doing more than 2 things at a time basically brings the system down to its knees.
  • Installing Windows Updates or performing any other intensive task resulted jittery sound while listening to music.
  • “Not Responding” is standard behavior one has to get used to.
• SQL Server 2008 SP1 + Visual Studio SP1 simply doesn’t work out of the box on Vista, but does on XP. All sorts of weird errors, named pipe problems and so on.
• Copying very large files (1GB+) from a shared folder results Explorer hang (“Not Responding”)
• and more and more and more…

Basically trying to do anything productive as a developer on Vista is shit. Back to XP.