How quickly we forget...

Vista itself isn't too bad, I don't think. I can find my way around alright, and it took me a while to get used to XP (I'm still not completely used to it after having it for several years, but I'm better with it than I was).

Office 2007 is what throws me. They completely redid the menus I spent years (quite literally) learning. And it throws me every time. Unfortunately, I'll have to convert to 2007 when I get my new computer this summer, as we no longer have the disks for 2003, and I doubt they'd be compatible with Vista anyway.

~C
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Nicholas Aden
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I just hate changing OS because it takes me forever to learn one system. I no more get used to it and they switch to a new one. And then I feel like i should have the option of deciding which OS I want to use without having to pay a freaking fortune. Let me decide if I want to use Vista or XP when I buy a computer and don't charge me more for choosing to use the one I'm most comfortable with. That infuriates me.

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Soar high and laugh on the wind
~Fallon~

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."- Thoreau
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There's quite a bit of difference between XP and its release and Vista and its release.

XP is still based off of the NT technology (the same that drives Windows 2000). The biggest change was the interface, to make it more "appealing" to the home user, since Windows 2000 was almost exclusively designed for business (I always thought it looked like something Playskool would come out with). Service Pack 2 also brought better wireless functionality. The idea with XP was 2000's security and stability for the home user.

Vista is a whole different animal. First of all, it was built from the ground up with a completely different architecture and file system (basically, it's like comparing Windows to the MacOS). It was also a very ambitious project (and a product of poor project management, in my opinion), and a shadow of its former design. The original design plan actually had about twice the features the current release has and was supposed to come out over 3 years before its actual release date (it was originally slated for 2003, then got pushed back as it became a major release, which was redated for July 2006). In other words, just to get it out in a reasonable amount of time, they had to cut most of the features.

While I think Vista was actually a good idea, since Microsoft finally shifted emphasis to security, there are still a number of things that should have been done differently.

The User Access Control (this is that popup you get every time you want to access things like the Device Manager or install something), for example, has no options. It's either on or off. Now, it's a good idea to have, especially for installing things, but there's no reason it should have a fit every time I want to open something like Firefox or Dreamweaver (I actually ended up turning it off because UAC had a fit every time I tried opening either of those). What it needs it options, like "always trust this program." You can do this without sacrificing security by not allowing the "always trust" thing for installations or device access, but the option should be there for software already installed on your machine.

Secondly, Vista is a resource hog, plain and simple. There's also no reason for the massive amount of resource usage. The minimum specs for a Vista machine are a dual-core processor, a gig of RAM, and a 20-gig hard drive with at least 10-gigs free (and it uses every byte of that; for Premium, though I wouldn't use the "Vista capable" requirements even for Basic, an 800MHz processor and 512mb RAM runs like a dog). When I installed Vista on my machine when it had a gig of RAM, just running the OS used half of that. Yet MacOS and Linux can both do what Vista can and more using a fraction of the resources (Macs still only come with about 512mb-1gig and run as good or better than the Vista machines with 2 and 3 gigs). Also, you can't turn off the Desktop Window Manager (in Home Premium and Ultimate, that's the feature that allows you to do the fun cascade thing and use your mouse wheel to scroll through oversized thumbnails of all your programs), which takes up more resources than Explorer (the GUI), which is already a resource hog in itself. More emphasis should have been put on making those features use less resources. It can be done, it has been done, many times, there's no excuse.

Third, unlike XP, Vista was forced out. Retailers had to either sell or return to the manufacturers all Windows XP machines by April of 2007, which meant that if you didn't buy a computer before that date, you were going to get Vista whether you liked it or not (and most computer people will tell you to wait until the first service pack of any Windows OS because then most of the bugs would be worked out and it's more likely all hardware available will be compatible). The only reason some OEMs, such as Dell, can still offer XP is because they have enough influence on Microsoft to do so, and even then, you'll only find it going straight through the OEM. If you find an XP machine in a retail store, I can pretty much guarantee it had been returned by a customer for whatever reason and is being sold as an open item.

A lot of hardware still doesn't work with Vista. And we're not just talking about old printers or something. We're talking about essential system devices. Things like network cards, motherboard components, and video cards. While they have gotten significantly better since the release, there are still a number of issues. I work in the tech department for a renowned graduate school and I've recently seen a number of cases where Microsoft's very own Windows Updates caused driver conflicts that were so bad, only a complete reinstall of the OS would fix the issue (then the update in question had to be marked to not download or install; ironically, it's described as a "reliability update").

Finally, while Microsoft finally shifted emphasis to security, their programmers still seem to be working on that. I've looked through some of the patch descriptions in the updates and found more "this fixes a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a vulnerable system" updates than I care to see, since chances are, they're buffer overflow vulnerabilities caused by poor programming habits and vulnerabilities in the C language (which is what they used for at least part of it; answers.com also mentions VB.net and C#).

That said I still like the idea of Vista. It has a lot of good features that, when properly implemented, are great. Built in parental controls, the elimination of Active Desktop (Win98 users probably remember that, especially when it crashed and you had this nice noticed on your desktop that told you about it), and more ability to customize the look of the taskbar (being able to change the color all you want, instead of only having one or two "themes" to work with, which is something I still hate about XP) are but a few of the things that are actually quite cool.

Don't get me started on Office 2007....it took me 10 minutes the other day to find the Word Count tool before I broke down and went to the page my boss found that shows where things are in Office 2007 by letting the user select them in Office 2003. The ribbon thing is a good idea if the owner has never used Office before in their lives, but for the rest of the world, it sucks and there's no way (except for a 3rd party add-on) to revert back to the old look.

-- quis custodiet ipsos custodes?