Kevin Ragsdale: Visual FoxPro 9.0

I Doubled My Productivity With One Simple Step

For the last couple of months, I have been dragging. Seems like every day I get just a little bit slower and a little less productive.

The last couple of weeks, it's gotten to the point where I dread getting on the laptop at night, looking for something - anything - to keep me from having to sit down in front of the keyboard.

Yes, for the last two months I've been horribly unproductive and uninspired.

Last night I didn't really feel like working (again), and I lost interest in the NCAA Tournament when Georgetown beat Vanderbilt, so I decided to try something that I hoped would knock me out of this unproductive funk: I wiped Windows Vista Business off the laptop, and reinstalled a fresh copy of XP Professional.

This morning I cranked up the laptop around 4:00 AM to finish setting everything up. An hour later, I started working.

WOW!

And do I mean W-O-W! What a difference! I felt more productive right away! Everything was faster. A LOT faster. The flashy Aero interface was gone, but to be honest, it had gotten a bit old for me by the third day of running Vista.

I know this doesn't quite match Microsoft's intention for their "The WOW starts now" marketing campaign for Vista, but Vista is, in my opinion, a dog. An incomplete dog. More like a "we better ship this thing by January 30th or Steve Ballmer will eat our livers with some fava beans and a nice chianti" dog. Sure, there's a ton of enhancements and improvements in Vista, BUT, when software gets in the way of productivity instead of enhancing productivity, I start looking for other software.

I'm not even talking about the User Account Control. I mean the computer got slower, and slower, and slower with each passing day. And as it slowed down, I became less inclined to work on it.

That said, I upgraded my Media Center 2005 to Windows Vista Home Premium last month, and I do like many of the UI enhancements in Home Premium's Media Center app.

If you're considering a move to Vista (any flavor) for daily production use, I strongly recommend waiting for (at least) service pack one.

Just my opinion.