So after this whole iTunes escapade, I decided to do some tweaking of Vista. By the way, after reboots and reinstallations, iTunes is finally working passably again. Still had to manually disable the iPhone service that it insists on running even when I don't have one plugged in, and it still chews a hefty 40MB while running. (Compare that to WinAmp's 6MB, and WMP 11's 18MB.) I'm still not impressed.

So first off on my list: Why is Vista so slow? I'm sure I'll get a bunch of you yak-jaws who'll want to come here and tell me that's just the nature of Windows. To bloat and slow down and die. Well, sadly, you're wrong. I noticed that my CPU was reaching 100% far more often, and things were just sluggish. I started looking into advanced things like... Maybe how Vista doesn't speedstep my processor correctly, or maybe a driver from Dell is incompatible (no surprise), or maybe my processor is just broken! In the course of this troubleshooting, I happened to check my power profile, and, uhm... For who knows how long, it's been on the default "Balanced" profile. Why? No idea. I always make my own profile that leaves everything on forever. Why was it using Balanced? No idea. But it was stepping my processor back to 800Mhz to save energy of which I have an infinite supply since I'm always running off the outlet. Needless to say, switching that back to "Always On" fixed the problem up just fine. Now it's running 2Ghz, even when it's idle. How long it's been like this, I don't know... But it's fixed now, and everything much faster.

I was on a roll! First iTunes, then CPU, next on my list? Why won't my system sleep? I push the button and it turns off the monitor, but everything's still active. Why? I look up sites and forums that give all sorts of advice that, frankly, doesn't work worth squat. I'm not very power-mindful and the power profile is still very alien to me. (As evidenced by the previous problem.) But, hey! Guess what. It was a power profile problem that cropped up after I enabled Media Center Sharing for my Xbox360. Basically, whenever it's sharing things, it won't let you standby. Solution? Force the power profile to standby even if it's sharing. It's pretty simple, after you get Media Center up and running. It adds a "multimedia settings" section in your advanced power profile settings. Change it to "allow the computer to sleep when sharing media" and boom! Sweet sleep.

Awesome. Two annoyances down and hey! Guess what? They weren't Vista bugs! It did exactly what my power profile was telling it to do. Huh. Windows doing what it's supposed to? Shocking? Well, maybe it does this more often than people think. With all the flak it gets, do people stop and think to check that maybe the problem lies with user error? Anyway... Next problem! Why does my system wake up within 5 seconds of sleeping. Clearly this is a Vista problem that Microsoft needs to fix. There's no other explanation! Or is there?

Enter Windows Event Viewer. A complete log of literally everything that ever happens to your computer. Let's see what the problem is, shall we? Event Viewer, Applications and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, Diagnostics-Performance, Operational... Aha! Looky here! There's a category for "Standby Performance Monitoring!" Hmm, there's a few warnings and critical errors. Let's see what they tell me. Hmm... "Notebook Hardware Control caused a delay during standby?" "SCSI CD-ROM Driver caused a delay during standby?" Let me check this... Oh, hey! There's a Babylon 5 DVD in the drive. Apparently, it was being accessed when Windows was going into standby and it woke it back up. NHC? That's a third-party power management program. You mean that interfering with standby? I don't need it. Let's get rid of it. Let's pop out the B5 disc, too... Let's try Standby again. Success!

Vista sleep mode screwed up? Nah. Third-party programs interfering. If that doesn't work, you might also try disabling the "wake on LAN" feature on your network card. That was another solution that actually made sense. (Personally, I do that on new systems anyway, so it wasn't a viable solution for my problem.)

Next on the list: Why the heck is SearchFilterHost swallowing up over 40% of the CPU? The nerve! I want background indexing! Background indexing! Is that hard to believe, Microsoft? Make this not use all my CPU when-... Oh. Task Manager says it's Low Priority. You mean it's using 40% of the CPU because nothing else is and it won't impact the performance of my system when I do run something else? Oh yeah? Prove it! I'm going to load Firefox. If that resource hole doesn't prove Microsoft screwed up again, nothing will! ...Oh. It... Stopped using 40% of the CPU when Firefox needed it. I guess it really does use idle CPU time.

So you mean all this time, the problems I've had since installing Vista really aren't Vista bugs, but other programs screwing around with (and myself mismanaging) power profiles? And everything else actually works as intended? Huh. Digg and Slashdot coulda fooled me.

And then there's that "Vista is updating itself even when I tell it not to", when it turns out that the only thing being updated are the Windows Update program files and nothing else. How about choosing the big ol' red X option "don't automatically download updates at all" instead of "notify me when there are some present". That'll cut back the auto-updates if it's really bothering you that much. Has it ever occurred to you that the Windows Update software is updating itself so it can see updates? If you don't want it to operate at all, turn it off, otherwise, don't be so ticked off when it does what you asked it to, okay?