Vista and file deletion
I've been running Windows Vista for about a year and a half (my desktop hasn't been reinstalled once), and find it to be great. But every once in a while I still encounter the ridiculously slow performance issue where file operations take forever - even simply browsing into a folder with Explorer. Here is an example of a folder deletion of a small source project with a bunch of Git history in it that Windows has been busy deleting for a good half an hour now:
A whole bunch of fixes were supposed to have been included in SP1 but it seems like some problems still remain 
UPDATE: it's something to do with the folder being shared - and unsharing takes extremely long, while keeping the hard drive very busy. Possibly some kind of dodgy recursive file system metadata update? Deleting from the command line with "rmdir /s" solved the problem in the end.
Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet on Vista Problem (with Solution)
Windows Device Manager Screenshot
Wacom makes the best graphics tablets there are, no question about it. Recently however I started experiencing a weird issue where the tablet work work just fine in Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, but not outside of these programs. After trying several different driver revisions it was clear that the problem was somehow related to Windows itself and not with the tabler or drivers - switching the pen from "pen mode" to "mouse mode" would actually make it work everywhere. However this has the downside of changing the tabled pointing mode from absolute coordinates to relative - so it works more like a touchpad than a tablet; this is undesirable as it completely mostly defeats the point of having a tablet whose surface is mapped directly to the screen.
The winning answer came courtesy of Mr Benedikt Schmitt of Wacom Europe, who offered the following solution: from the Windows Device Manager, disable the "Wacom Virtual Hid Driver" device. (Go to Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Device Manager, find the driver, right-click it and choose "Disable".) One reboot later (welcome to Windows-land, circa 2008?), everything works as desired. Pressure and tilt sensitivity inside Photoshop still work, and the pen functions just fine in the rest of the Windows desktop. The absolute mapping makes it an absolute pleasure to point quickly and precisely. It makes my laser mouse feel rather clumsy navigating a large 24" screen!
Windows Vista Chronicles
I recently upgraded my desktop PC at home to Vista and the results were rather surprising. I found XP to be getting a bit old and dabbling in some hackintosh experiments only made its age more apparent. While Apple's OS is excellent, my old graphics card died and I could never get the replacement to play nicely with Leopard. There were several other small niggles (all due to the nature of the hack) with that installation but I liked OS X well enough to consider buying a Mac.
The trouble with the current Apple Mac line-up is that I wanted a desktop machine which only leaves the Mac Pro, and that's frankly way out of my reach. The iMac is nice but using laptop internals in an all-in-one design means it is a bit underpowered for what you pay, and totally lacking in the extensibility dept. For photography in particular the 24" model is a far better bet as it uses a fancy H-IPS LCD panel. These do not suffer from contrast and colour shifts related to viewing angle changes and are better than the common 6-bit TN panels. At that price I'd rather buy a separate LCD that I can connect to other things too, thank you very much. So while waiting for the mythical midrange Mac minitower, Vista SP1 got released and my curiosity got the better of me.
Naturally, there were a few issues along the way. One of the first was a documented problem - my screen saver was not kicking in, no matter what. Turns out that this is caused by none other than a piece of Microsoft hardware! Oh the irony. Certain types of Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse USB receivers cause this and the solution is to install the "Microsoft - Other hardware - HID Non-User Input Data Filter" update from Windows Update. Bizarrely, this is an optional update so you have to explicitly get it.
Another issue is the well publicized problem with monitor calibration settings being lost after sleep, UAC prompts, or after starting full-screen games. It seems as though the video card Look-Up Tables (LUT) get reset on any of the above mentioned events. No real solution in sight - my workaround is to place a shortcut to the spyder2express start-up item on my Start Menu and run it manually if I notice that the calibration is lost. (If you're using a ColorVision spyder product, you will find an item called ColorVisionStartup under All Programs > Startup. Just drag it somewhere convenient or assign a keyboard shortcut via its properties panel. Other calibration solutions will probably have a similar loader program.) Windows really needs better support for this - Mac OS X does it brilliantly via System Preferences, no need for proprietary utilities to load the LUT.
I do pretty much all my digital photography in Pentax’s proprietary raw format called PEF. Although my primary camera is one of the few that support Adobe’s DNG file format, the PEF format as implemented in it offers lossless compression and thus better shooting capacity. I import my files with Adobe Lightroom, and it has the option to convert them into DNG on the fly, this time compressed. I also have some Canon CR2 files from shooting with friends’ cameras which I have also converted into Adobe’s format for long term storage. So I have quite a few DNG files lying around and I was very excited to read that Adobe has released a DNG codec for Windows Vista. Such codecs allow you to see thumbnails in Windows Explorer and browse images just like any old JPEG in Windows Photo Gallery. It works well and it even reflects Lightroom's develop settings although it’s a touch slow – the rendering speed is comparable to the delay you'd get in Bridge to get a full preview.
Besides messing with your LUTs, colour management in Vista appears to work well. I tried exporting the same file from Lightroom into sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB JPEGs. All three as well as the original DNG’s colours look identical in the built-in picture viewer! On a related note - do remember to turn on colour management in Firefox 3 to get the same consistency in there as well. Of course the proof of all this will be in the printed results that I can get, but I am not there yet.
Unfortunately, I had to uninstall the DNG codec because it causes indexing to slow down to a crawl. It would appear as if the indexing service asks it to provide the metadata for each file, and the codec renders the full image in the background before returning. Took me a while to figure this one out but with a good few gigabytes of DNG files, my index was taking weeks and still wasn’t finished. I tried excluding various folders of the index until I found it was photos that were causing it. Uninstalling the DNG codec and the full index got rebuilt in a few hours. The Adobe Labs page suggested reporting any issues on their user forums which I have done – but there hasn't been any response as yet. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release because Windows Search is proving to be quite a useful addition to the OS.
Another minor annoyance is the inability to change he menu bar colour. In previous versions if Windows, you could change the individual widgets' default colour scheme. In Vista, the menu bar is a funky shade of blue. Change the Aero colours only affects the window frames, and fiddling with the Advanced settings does not have an effect on the menu bars. (The menus themselves are gray - mmmkay?) This is especially annoying in imaging programs such as Lightroom where the UI designers specifically only chose neutral grey hues to minimize interference with your photos' colours.
I am using AVG Free 8.0 for now but the whole Link Scanner mess is very annoying. Why can't it just scan only what I actually visit? I have disabled the Firefox AVG extension which inserts yucky green ticks into your Google Search results until they back down on this silliness, or something better comes along.
All in all, I've been very impressed with Vista and the upgrade was not at all the bumpy ride that I was expecting. Its ability to auto-locate and install certified drivers off of Windows Update is just great. It saved me from installing all the crapware that comes on our HP all-in-one OfficeJet driver CD, just plugged it in and it was ready. It even found a driver for my PCI Wi-Fi card which I'd given up searching for on SMC's website. Sleep also works fine - something I could never get right with XP. It has also been rock solid which is probably the most important thing.