The header says it all. I got a new computer this summer and it came with the Vista OS. I cannot find a single way in which it is better and dozens of ways in which it sucks. Even the games have been made less playable.
Yes, I prefer Vista. I’m finally making the move from Windows 2000 because Vista is significantly less frustrating to use than Windows XP which I hated from the first moment I tried it. Under XP I could never find anything and it was just always in the way.
I turn off all the aero crap and set Vista to a windows classic theme and otherwise customize away most of the foofy interface nonsense and it has turned out to be a pretty decent setup for me. Microsoft still has a long way to go but as far as I’m concerned this is a huge step in a good direction (of course, any step away from XP would be an improvement).
I prefer Vista, too. I haven’t had any problems so far. In what ways does it suck?
My personal machine runs a ton of vintage software on Vista. I’ve only found one app that wouldn’t install and it was by HP. It’s since been updated. I use my old Serial digitizer/drawing slate (circa 1996) for handwriting and painting.
I prefer Vista, though I run XP daily on work and household computers. It’s actually pretty easy to switch back and forth.
Just make sure your hardware can handle it or you will be really pissed after you upgrade.
Let me count the ways. First the find facility does not find anything in “program files” or any subdirectory. I can’t stand the partially transparent windows. I had to buy an upgrade to 4NT since the old version wouldn’t install. (I use command lines extensively.) One version of the software I use constantly (TeX for mathematical word processing) apparently installed and seemed to run, but the font builder didn’t have the correct permissions to write files. A different version came on a CD and you have to run the setup program since it did not autorun. When I clicked on the CD, it showed 4041 out of the 4042 files in the disk. The one it refused to display was, needless to say, the setup program. (This happened after, not before, I realized that “administrator” does not have administrative priveleges unless you set them to, so that was not the problem.) I had to install from a command prompt, which did show that setup program. I cannot copy and exe file into “program files” so that I had to copy my editor program into a root directory (this editor is so old that it came on a diskette and is installed just by copying the files.) Oh yes, the games are less playable. In the XP version of solitaire, you could move an ace or other card up to the stack by right clicking; this feature has been eliminated. In spider solitaire, you could get the next deal by either clicking on a “deal” button on the top bar or by clicking on the pack, whichever was more convenient (mostly the former). The “deal” button has been eliminated. Whatever I want to do, it seems to fight me every inch of the way and I am losing the battles. What I wouldn’t give to downgrade to XP!
I’m mostly OK with Vista. One smaller thing that ticked me off: you can’t drag & drop on the command-line window, a feature that was in XP and earlier.
Also, the networking seems to be buggy: my nephew had downgrade to XP after getting “Unidentified Network” errors that multiple IT folk couldn’t figure out or fix, so he had no net connection at all.
- It’s less stable than XP - I’ve had vista since the first day it came out. It’s already crashed and/or frozen 10 times as often as XP did the entire time I used it.
- It doesn’t play nice with so many programs; not only ones either, but the most recent before vista was released versions. Nero, Dragon Naturally Speaking, PowerDVD, PowerDirector, MusicMatch Jukebox, Lexmark’s imaging program, Big Box of Art… and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. It even repeatedly runs into problems with other Microsoft programming like its sync program for pocketPCs running PocketOffice I think we’re up to the 8th “stable” build of the new sync program.
- It’s a resource hog. This computer which has duel-core 4600+ processors and 2GB of ram runs no faster than my XP machine with a single 2700+ processor and 1GB of ram. And this is after I’ve turned a good deal of the “prettiness” off, too.
- The search features have been dumbed down and take several times as long to find things than XP did. The programming to find partial names is broken - it often can’t find search strings of things you can actually see on the screen if the letters you’re looking for aren’t at the beginning of the file name.
- Copying and moving files takes several times longer than it did with XP. They released a hotfix for the problem, but it doesn’t help much.
- The defrag application will not give you any indication of how long it will take to defrag or indicate how much of the defragging it has done. All it says is “defragging could take several minutes to several hours.”
- The image viewer, which worked just fine in XP has been “improved.” The improvement doesn’t support viewing animated gifs. WTF? You shouldn’t have to download a third-party program in order to view a common image type.
- Vista constantly forgets folder customizations. What’s the point of letting you customize the details it displays (like you don’t want it to display ratings or track numbers in music folders) if you have to reset them every 2 days? It also takes it upon itself to create folders too - every couple of weeks it generates a folder called My Music for no apparent reason.
- Even running as an administrator it often tells you that you’re not “allowed” to move or delete things. Once you reboot the computer, however, you’re magically allowed the privilege…
I’m sure other people have their own laundry lists of things that they’ve noticed are terrible about this OS too.
This is a new computer with Vista factory-installed, ftr.
Which mode are you using, “Pistol” or “Banjo”?
One other way that Vista bugs me. I still haven’t figured out how to get it to display file extensions. They are often important to me.
If you’re happy with Vista, cool, but I have to point out that you could have turned off all the annoying floofy crap in XP, too. I’ve got XP Pro set to the Windows Classic theme and it’s about the best OS I could use.
[any folder view]->Organize->Folder Options – uncheck “hide extensions for known file types”.
In XP it was [any folder view]->Tools->Folder Options – uncheck “hide extensions for known file types”. Not all that different – they moved it from one menu to another, but it was still in Folder Options.
You can change the color and transparency of all the windows however you like. You can make them completely opaque, if you’re so inclined.
I’m not fond of Vista and don’t know much about it, either. XP is the flavor that I can tolerate the best and that doesn’t mean I like it. Bill Gates is a primary putz.
But, folks, we’re all experienced computer users here, right? And we know that when a new version of any program, especially OSes, comes out, there rarely is a helpful list of what the “experts” who designed the program have done and where they think they know best. We have to muddle thru and find out by trial and error and exchanging observations.
So my caution is maybe the defaults you are used to are not the defaults anymore. Maybe the function customization has been moved to another menu. Maybe it has been removed to a registry key change instead of a menu option (because the powers that be thought you would be confused). Maybe you have more options than before, they’re just organized differently. Maybe flash (fancy, spinning, animated displays) has been deemed more important than substance (copying files, opening files, managing stuff) and you will have to make your machine lean and mean if you want to use it at the familiar old, fast speed.
I’m just sayin’, before you bitch too much, see if there is more to it than just “Damn – it don’t work the way it’s supposed to”.
More specifically, and I’m talking to you, elfkin477, the number of folder values that can be stored is a limited number, configurable in the registry. Maybe you need to investigate this and boost it. The reason why Vista doesn’t find files could be because the default search string is not . (Bill Gates doesn’t think you need to use that), and as squeegee has pointed out, the setting for file extension display has moved.
Just sayin’…
I would like to nominate this as the post of the day.
Ahhh…nope. Don’t get it. Can someone illuminate please?
Sorry.
M
Dueling pistols. Dueling banjos.
This may all be true. (I haven’t used Vista yet, so I can’t say.) But it IS a resource hog, on a scale where the computer manufacturers had to redesign their computers with the infamous duel:D-core processors just to handle the load of the new OS.
Given all that, the new OS must provide some serious payoff in return, right?
It’s just another way for M$ to rake in the $$$ by jamming their throbbing Winmember down everyone’s throats. Pretty soon everyone and their mother will be using Vista and you’ll have to use Vista because nothing will run on XP, and we’ll all have to switch, and we’ll all die a little inside while Clippy masturbates to our agony.
Weird. Are you using MiKTeX?
This reminds me, I only have had one problem with Vista, which was with MiKTeX - I downloaded the net installer, installed a full LaTeX system, which took ages, shut down my computer, then went to bed. The morning after, I rebooted, to find LaTeX nowhere on my system!
I found turning UAC off solves this - no more needing to run programmes in ``elevated mode". It also seems to make Vista start quicker.
“It looks like you’re bashing the candle. Would you like help?”