While I don't normally comment on political matters on this site, I feel compelled to do so today.

The problem concerning the presidential primary calendar has intensified this week as the Democratic party voted to strip Florida of its 210 delegates if it didn't delay its primary elections by a week. While the wisdom of upsetting Florida voters in a presidential election is debatable, the headline underscores the growing controversy over the primary process.

All of this calendar shuffling to see which state can have the first primaries has gotten ridiculous. I agree that it is unfair to give New New Hampshire and Iowa a vastly disproportionate representation in the primary process, but states moving around their calendars to see who can get in first is simply not the answer.

The way out of this mess is astonishingly simple. In fact it's so simple it's likely never to be done. Simply have all states have their primary elections on the same day. Pick a day, any day, say in January, February, or even March, and stick to it. All presidential primary candidates would have to appeal to and campaign in the entire country, giving every state a voice in who political parties end up having as their candidate.

This isn't groundbreaking and I'm sure it has been suggested before, but it would seem that it is the simplest and most fair way out of the mess.

Last time I posted that Vista x64 edition was substantially better than its 32-bit counterpart. For the most part, that's correct, but I spoke too soon. Vista, in any edition right now, is not a suitable operating system for a power user, meaning anyone who needs more from their computer than e-mail, web browsing, and basic operations.

I've made numerous postings as to why I think Vista isn't ready for us as a serious OS so I won't bother you with those details again, but essentially many of the problems that I experienced and overall sluggishness I felt while using Vista on my highest end hardware were still there with x64, it just took them longer to surface, and the 64-bit kernel made them a bit harder to notice at first.

When I switched back to XP though, I installed Windows XP Professional x64 edition. I've had this edition before, back when it had pitiful driver availability, but this time all of my hardware was supported, and I have yet to find one compatibility problem yet. I don't have to go out on too far a limb to say that Windows XP Professional x64 edition is by far the most stable, productive, and reliable operating system Microsoft made.

So when will I switch to Vista again? Not for quite some time. I'm not even sure that a service pack can fix some of the problems that just seem inherent with it. SP1 won't make the DRM issue go away, it won't reduce the ludicrous amount of versions of the operating system, and it won't fix the claustrophobic start menu that to me at least is less productive than the XP version.

The two recent hotfixes released meant to increase performance and fix some of the most annoying problems with Vista are being met with mixed reviews. Some say they see a difference, some can't tell they installed them. The newly discovered network performance drop while playing audio has prompted a quick rebuttal from Microsoft, claiming in part that it is designed behavior.

Needless to say, the situation with Vista is just plain messy right now, and I'm not sure when it will be straightened out. Until then, I'm running XP on my Windows machine, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time.

The computer I keep Windows XP on started developing problems, so a reinstall was in order. I knew I didn't want to put Vista 32-bit back on, and since I recently obtained the 64-bit edition from our volume license agreement, I thought I'd give it a whirl, hoping that it would be a better experience than my first one with Vista.

It's been several days, and while I can't report with certainty yet, it does indeed look like Vista 64 is substantially faster and more polished than 32-bit. I'm sure they're the same edition, just compiled with the 64-bit assembly, but it really does feel like a different (and better) OS. The faster part surprised me quite a bit, because Windows XP 64-bit wasn't much faster than the 32-bit edition of XP for me (if any), but this does seem noticeably snappier. It's almost compatible to the performance of XP.

Frame rate issues in games were gone, they're performing roughly the same now as they were under Windows XP. The compatibility problems I ran into with Windows XP 64-bit were gone, I didn't have one single 64-bit issue.

So far, I'm impressed, but Vista has done a lot to make me feel like it's a third rate operating system, and even if this install takes and I keep it for quite some time, I'll still not be crazy about the direction Microsoft took vista. That said, I do have to give credit where credit is due.

I hope I won't regret this post a week from now.