That’s right, I just bought a new laptop, HP dv7, and it came with Vista. Whatever, no big deal, I’ll just put XP on it if Vista sucks, right? Well for a week, maybe two, Vista was okay. I told people once you turn off the video effects, it’s pretty much the same as XP. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. And it started to become unusable. Then I made the mistake of trying to use XP–HP apparently doesn’t want anybody to install XP on this laptop.

On Vista, I turned off all the translucent windows and other video effects. It pretty much did feel like I still had XP, except every time I tried to do anything: drag an icon from the start menu to the desktop, install a program, uninstall a program, etc. I would get messages coming up asking me if I wanted to do this (Security, to make sure someone isn’t doing it remotely, I assume, or that a program is doing it automatically without me knowing.)

2nd difference was the file explorer. What a mixed bag. Some cool new features–bread crumbs, shows you data transfer speed, and few other things I can’t remember right now. Then, there were the problems. The big one: selecting a folder in the tree view using the arrow keys did not refresh the right (preview?) pane. You either have to push spacebar or click the folder name with your mouse. I have many very organized folders with a lot of files, and it’s a lot faster for me if the explorer shows the folder’s contents as soon as they’re selected.

Booting Vista took too long. I think XP takes too long on this laptop, and it’s way faster than Vista. However, bear in mind I have an EEE 701 set up to boot in 20 seconds, so what else would make me happy?

Oh, and file transfer was seriously fucked up. Took twice as long to delete things as XP does, I don’t know why. File copy to USB drives was pretty slow. I disabled some options that worked for a lot of people, but it didn’t seem to make any difference for me, and transfers were still pretty slow. (I read somewhere that when moving zipped files, Vista unzips everything, moves it, then re-zips it. I wonder if that’s true.)

All these things were a little discouraging, but I felt like the file transfer stuff would eventually be fixed, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I had gotten used to the new file explorer. But then, the random freezes started coming. That’s right, random freezes. The last straw kind of random freezes, that are frequent and close-between. I couldn’t have been running Vista more than two weeks. Maybe it was something I did, something I installed, but I wasn’t using any new programs I hadn’t used on XP. So WTF, I installed XP.

Clusterfuck. Pardon the profanity, but that’s what installing XP on the dv7 was. Thanks for the lack of support, HP. They like to show their support by bogging down your new computer with pointless software. I won’t go into it with too much detail, but I finally got it working well thanks to this message board here. The only thing still touchy is the sound, which is fixed by running a batch file (the devcon hack in the link) on startup. The dv7 has a subwoofer, and if you install one driver it only plays sound through the subwoofer, and if you install the a different driver sound works perfectly, until you reboot the computer, then you have no sound at all. But the devcon batch works great, and all is well.

The really funny thing is, someone fired up Suse Linux on a similar model and said everything worked immediately, even the speakers. I’m wondering about Arch–a dual boot may be in order…