Sick to death of Vista

Firstly, I have to state that I am a big fan of Microsoft Products in general. I've made my career with Microsoft products and they have, on the whole, overall, been good products... Now, to the point:

I bought a new machine, so I wanted to get myself the latest operating system and Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate seemed the way forward at the time.

Initially, I was impressed, I even touted its new superior features to my Vista-less colleges and made fun of one college who after a month reverted his system to Windows XP (I heavily hinted he was technologically backward). Well, after having used Vista for over a year and a half I am absoloutely sick to death of it and completely don't blame him and actually feel bad for being mean to him!

When I first installed Vista, it was a pleasure to see. It looked great and the 3D and transparancy effects gave my PC a feel of "the wave of the future". This was all great whilst I was only really using my PC as an entertainment centre (Vista is a top notch entertainment center style operating system).

So, during the day I worked using Windows XP in the office (I was running Windows XP, not out of any particular preference over Vista but just becuause my system was already setup and configured exactly the way I liked it and had been for 2 years) and I would come home to play games and relax with Music, Video and DVD using Vista. Life was ok.

Anyway, time moves on. I left my job. I went back to working for myself, so I used my home PC for both work and leisure purposes, and this is how I came to loath Windows Vista!

In my experience, Windows Vista simply does NOT support productivity, and I find it hard to detail why, but the main problem is the Window Vista shell, Windows Explorer!

It fails to be usefull by a number of subitle ommisions or ill conceived additions that serve to frustrate rather than to aid one in whatever task one wishes to perform.

The first frustration is Windows Update. Three times Windows Update has restarted the computer without my permission interrupting and preventing the completion of important running processes. This is unforgivable! It wasn't like these programs where badly written, they correctly responded to the shutdown requests, Windows Vista Update just decided it "knew better". So complaint one, unacceptable loss of work.

The second frustration is the Windows Explorer view. In Windows XP this was simple to configure how you liked the view to be, you could select your columns and save your settings for each folder. You could even set a single global setting for everything. Windows Vista has the same options, but they simply fail to work (yes, i'm on the latests updates, didn't my machine reboot without my permission on three occasions to make sure I was!!! >.<). To qualify exactly how these views fail, I shall list the main faults: 1) Windows attempt to "guess" what view you want when you enter a folder. This guess always happend regardless to wether you have or have not configured the desired view. What this results in is that as you add and remove files from the folder the view can change from whatever view you choose.

2) Configuring a single view for the entire system simply fails to work (or, if you apply the fix mentioned on the web for this, works breifly until you change the content of any folder at which time all folders seem to revert to a single column view).

3) In Windows XP, if you had a large number of files selected then you accidently double click you would be asked if you really meant to double click those files. Under Windows Vista, it just tends to go ahead with the double click!

4) The behavious of the "Backspace" key in Windows Explorer has been changed to be the same as in Internet Explorer. This is stupid because whilst this might be usefull behaviour on the internet it is not desirable in Explorer. So, if I want to return to the "parent" folder from an explorer view in Vista I must navigate to it using the Tree View because the back button will take me to some random location from which I have just come (which is rarely the parent folder).

5) Which brings me to the Folder Tree View in Windows Explorer. Under Windows Vista this tree view does not have any horizontal scroll bar. Just stating that, it sounds like a pettie complaint! However, when you realise that this means if you have a long file path you can't see it without expaning the Tree View Pain you might start to see how irritating this is.

6) There is a bug in internet explorer which means a malformed web page containing Java Script in its header can cause the we page to load over and over again and prevent you exiting Internet Explorer in the normal fashion. So, if you are debuggin web-scripts it is made b***y difficult.

There are many more seemingly minor irritants, which, when experienced as a whole and with a view towards productivity are major drains.

The one thing is odd is that many people have complained about UAC. For me UAC is the one saving grace of Windows Vista! UAC works really well and really helps me take control of the applications running on the PC.

In balance, the technology underlying Windows Vista is sound, and the security improvements are excellent! Its just such a shame it is so poorly aligned to the work environment by stupid bugs in Windows Explorer etc.