My Vista Experience -or- I Hate Vista

Several weeks back, I needed to reload my PC. I said to myself, "Self, since you're going through the painful process of reloading Windows anyway, why not try Vista?" So I did. My first exciting dive into Vista from the warm, comfortable embrace of XP.

At first, it went pretty well. The install took a surprisingly long time, but it was reasonably straightforward (not as good as, say, Ubuntu Linux, but still pretty good), and Vista recognized nearly all my hardware, whereas with XP, I have to download and install lots of drivers to get all my hardware working. (For the record, Ubuntu Linux recognizes every last bit of hardware on both of my computers, and configures it all correctly without any extra effort from me.)

My happiness was short lived, however. I encountered a myriad of problems with Vista over the next several weeks, including, but not limited to:

* It takes a long time to boot. A really long time. It makes it to the login screen quickly, but that's just to give users the illusion of a fast boot. It's not really sitting at the desktop and reasonably ready to be used for much longer.

* It didn't format the hard drive upon installation, which is a feature. It allows you to more easily move your old documents into your new install. However, I ran into tons of problems removing the old documents once I was done with them. It's a difficult procedure (because I apparently didn't have access to delete my own old documents?!), and I never did get it to work for groups of files and directories. I was stuck changing the owner and permissions one file at a time, deleting the file, and then moving onto the next.

* Microsoft made some pointless name changes to personal directories (folders). This just makes things needlessly difficult.

* User Access Control (UAC) really is an annoyance. I saw that thing pop up hundreds of times over the course of a few weeks. I guess you can blame this on poorly written applications, but even Windows itself was constantly popping that thing up in my face.

* Windows Explorer and Windows Photo Gallery can't display Photoshop (PSD) pictures. Compare this to the free Picasa from Google, which can. This might sound like a nitpick, but come on, I installed Vista Ultimate. How can one of the most popular photo editing formats not be supported by Windows Explorer and Windows Photo Gallery?

* Vista is fat. Really fat. It uses an obscene amount of memory. Moving from XP to Vista is like removing half of your RAM.

* Vista is always grinding the hard drive, for some reason or another. And, yes, I know about Vista indexing the system. It grinds the hard drive even after the indexing was done.

* Poor application compatibility. For example, Vista is not compatible with my CD/DVD burning software, and some of my other productivity software. What happened to the much exhalted backwards compatibility in Windows?

* The CD/DVD burning software built into Vista can't burn ISOs. (Once again, I'll remind the reader that this is the Ultimate version of Vista I'm talking about. There's just no excuse for forcing me to find, download, install, and learn another program just so I can burn ISOs.)

* Vista Ultimate is expensive...really expensive. (So is Vista Business.) And those are the only two versions that support the Remote Desktop server. That just stinks, since I'm a Remote Desktop user.

* Vista is slow. Dear God, I have no idea what the hell Vista is doing. But it's damn slow.

* Lots and lots and lots of pointless changes for no good reason that I could determine. It makes using the system pointlessly difficult.

* There are too many versions of Vista. It was really bewildering and confusing. I settled on Ultimate because of that confusion. That's probably what Microsoft is counting on: confusing users with the myriad of versions so they'll give up in frustration and spend far too much money on the Ultimate version. (Fortunately, I was able to test drive a version of Vista Ultimate for which I didn't have to pay, otherwise I'd be suffering horrible buyer's remorse right now.)

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. It's been a month or two since I used Vista, so I'm going on my memory, which is pretty spotty. But, believe me, there's a lot more wrong with Vista. Do yourself a favor, skip Vista, even if it means delaying upgrading your hardware for another year, or two, or three...

If the next version of Windows is as stinky as Vista, my wife's next machine will be a Macintosh, and I've already moved my personal machine to XP and Ubuntu Linux.