Blue Screen Of Duds

I had my first major run in with Vista on Sunday after agreeing to fix Nikhil’s new laptop with a XP install. Since XP did not have the required SATA drivers, it would not recognize the hard disk drive and allow me to wipe it clean and ‘upgrade‘ the laptop to Vista. That left me poking around to see how the beast was and it is a user experience par compare in terms of being an absolute disaster.

First thing that gets your notice are the number of alert boxes that pop up for almost everything you do. I do “sudo” on OSX for everything that requires admin level access and I am also used to authenticating key actions, but Vista goes out of its way to make the experience almost entirely painful.

Secondly, they have worked REALLY hard to add another level of abstraction to existing screens and menus. For instance, the Control Panel, when you dig deeper, has pretty much the same layout and items on it as XP, but on top it is a totally different beast.

As a ground rule, what I’ve seen is that almost everything is harder by differing magnitudes on the entire operating system. If I had my own way, I would gladly pop the latest Ubuntu CD, wipe out Vista and forget all about it.

Microsoft may have made Vista one of the most stable OSes it has ever released, but what good is a stable OS if it is a royal pain to use in the first place? And I’ve not even gotten into the 14 different versions it has and the perpetual question: “will it do full Aero?” In any case, the eye candy is not even fun to use and serves very little purpose with the constantly throbbing and pulsating buttons.

I can only say that I’ve never been happier about switching.