[DKTaber]

Geez! I feel like I may be taking my life in my hands here with all the dirt flying around. Doesn't seem right for a place that supposed to help people with their problems instead of getting on soap boxes.

At the risk of being hit by a brick bat intended for someone else, I would like to make some comments about Vista and to ask some questions.

First, I purchased a new HP Pavilion only last Sunday. It's not a high-end machine; AMD Athlon 5000+ dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, and of course, Vista. I didn't think I needed a high-end, gamer-type machine because I don't play any games on it other than Freespace and Hearts occasionally. I use it mostly to run a business and use Word, Excel, and Access 2000 to do 98% of the work. Here are my initial impressions of Vista:
It is every bit as fast or faster with Office programs as my old XP PC.
It is horribly slow with e-mail, to the point that when I want to create a new e-mail, it takes so long to open the blank message window that it says "(not responding)" in the title bar.
The cold boot time is longer and the HD runs continuously for ~4 minutes after the Desktop appears. It takes so much of the computers power during that 4 minutes that if you double-click a shortcut to open a program, it can take 1/2 minute before the program actually opens.
The games (Freecell, Hearts) are awful; worse than awful. Extremely slooooow, and require extreme precision when trying to move cards. It's so bad, I've stopped playing those games.
My do-all utility, Avanquest's SystemSuite 8, which I downloaded only one day after getting the computer because it was advertised as Vista-compatible, is emasculated by Vista within an hour of bootup. By 'emasculated', I mean that I get a message that "MXTask has stopped working and will close", after which I find that the firewall and automatic file and e-mail scanning modules have been disabled and the SS8 icon in the Systray is deleted. The only way to reactivate these is to reboot.
Permissions: What the hell are these? I'm the only user of the computer and should have the same rights as the administrator. But if I open Explorer to delete some folders that have subfolders, I get a message saying I don't have permission to do that. So I have to delete each subfolder, one by one, then delete the parent folder. Why?
One of the absolutely worst things MS did in Vista is Windows Mail. I have used OE for years. It had identities that allowed you to segregate your business and personal e-mail. Windows Mail dispensed with identities, saying it's better to set up different users. BullSh**! I overcame part of this maldesign by creating Message Rules that sent the business and personal e-mails to two folders I created. Problem is, I see no way to create Message Rules that will similarly segregate my Sent Items for these two identities.

So, in short, I'm in the camp that would like to replace Vista on my new machine with XP. The only reason I bought the new Vista computer is because my XP machine started to not boot reliably due to a malfunctioning motherboard. I'm not saying that XP is perfect; it certainly isn't. But it is more stable, has faster games, does not interfere with my ability to move or delete folders, does not constantly remind me that User Account Control is turned off (how can I stop that GD message from popping up all the time?), allowed me to segregate my business and personal e-mail accounts, did not run the HD for 4 minutes after bootup, making it almost impossible to do anything during that time, etc., etc., etc.

I'm totally open to ideas, people telling me I'm wrong (but have to say why and how do I fix it). So, tell me.