Windows Vista home Basic - After A Year

I bought my laptop last year (HP Compaq Presario V6000) and it came preloaded with Windows Vista Home Basic. I was excited as Vista was new and different. It was something else altogether then the XP that I had been using all the while.

I must say, it did turn out to be different. Its slow, uses a lot of RAM and keeps freezing. (I need to reboot my laptop every now and then). Since Vista was new and had just come in, I expected it to have a few gliches and give me some problem, but problem is what I was facing every day. In the first month itself, it crashed thrice, third time being the worst where the Recovery Manager wouldn't work as well. I had to take it to HP service Center to get it up and running again.

Thats when I learnt that I need to create a Recovery Disk (for such situations), first thing when I start using Vista. Well, the sales rep failed to inform me on that.
Anyways, I haven't been too happy with the performance of Vista (though its the Home Basic version which is the lowest in the league, Ultimate being the most power crunching version). I have an AMD Turion 64x2 processor (1.6Ghz) with 1GB Ram, and with this config, trust me, XP works amazingly well.

I was expecting things to be better after regular downloads of the updates from Windows, but to my surprise, with every update downloaded and installed, my laptop runs even slower. This is what I learnt later, Vista needs a lot of Ram and 1GB (which i have on my laptop) is just not enough for it, not even for Home Basic. And I agree to that, my laptop crawls, crawls to such an extent that it seems  I am running XP with a 256MB Ram.

When I compare it to my desktop, which runs XP Professional and has a 1GB Ram, with the Intel Pentium 4 processor, I would give double the rating to my desktop then to my laptop. First thing I realised after buying the laptop with Vista Home basic, is that it wasn't as responsive as XP. And with time, after installing all the updates for Vista, I find it even worst. It just gets more slow, to put it in other words, it gets older with time and more inputs..

I have also installed the Service Pack 1 for Vista, hoping that to do some good, but to no gain. It is still the same, except that it doesn't crash anymore. But it still eats up the Ram to the max, to such an extent that I am left with no option but to reboot my laptop. And this happens atleast twice  everyday (of the 6 odd hours that I work on my laptop)

Worst news came to me when I decided to downgrade to XP Professional. I was suggested against it by an IT Professional, stating that it would be really difficult for me to get all the drivers for my laptop is I have to install XP.

That killed it (killed me)

I regret being hasty while buying my laptop with Vista Home Basic pre-installed. I should have rather waited for some time, checked what are people's experiences with it, read more reviews regarding its performance before choosing Vista. I should have opted for XP on my laptop as well.

Rating: 4