It’s been a while since Microsoft release their newest OS, Vista, and yet the complaints just haven’t stopped. I just ran across this humorous piece about “upgrading” to Windows XP and decided it was time to write a little bit about Vista.
I can’t say I’m an expert by any means as I’ve only had limited experience with Vista at this point. What experience I did have, however, was quite annoying and really turned me away from the thought of installing it. Overall, Vista has an interesting look. It’s not that bad, in reality, though it does seem to be a bit of overkill in the eye candy department. It feels like Microsoft tried to make everything shiny and attractive, but ended up with a shiny, gaudy look instead.
My first experience with Vista involved setting up a Vista machine for network access. Since setting up networking involves changing system settings, I was logged in as an administrator. I popped open the control panel to set up the network adapter and spent the next 15 minutes messing around with the settings, prompted time and again to allow the changes I was making. It was a frustrating experience, to say the least. Something that takes me less than a minute to accomplish on a Windows XP machine, or even on a Linux machine, takes significantly longer on a Vista machine.
I also noticed a number of pauses, quite noticeable, as I manipulated files. This happened on more than one machine, making me think there’s something wrong with the file subsystem in Vista. I’ve heard it explained as a DRM mechanism, checking for various DRM schemes in an attempt to enforce them. Either way, it’s slow and takes forever to accomplish simple copy and paste tasks.
One of my more recent experiences was an attempt to get Vista to recognize a RAZR phone. I never did get that working, even with Motorola’s Vista compatible software. I tried installing, uninstalling, and re-installing the software several times, rebooting in between, enduring the stupid security dialogs all the while. Vista seems to have recognized the phone, but would not allow the user to interact with it.
They say that first impressions are the most important and, up to this point, Vista has not made a good impression on me at all. If and when I do move to Vista, it will be with me kicking and screaming the entire way…