So it’s a win-win situation. Microsoft sells more and the hardware manufacturers sell more. Only the consumer loses.
It does. But not to the consumer.
The first version I tried to install was TeXLive, the 2007 version. On texhax they told me that it was finalized just a week after Vista came out and they will probably get it fixed by next year. Only the previewer failed to work because it could not write fonts. Iinstalled an older version (2.5) of Miktex and that seems to work fine. The only thing is I mistakenly accepted the default location of installing under “program files” only to discover that that means I cannot search it, which is ridiculous since I often have to find an modify certain macros files. Or see if a certain font is available. I have not succeeded in coercing find into looking into any directory under “program files”.
As for the other customizations people have suggested, I have looked for and not found them. Help is, needless to say, unhelpful. Eventually, I will buy a guide to using Vista. It seems to be the only way to wrestle the 800 lb gorilla to the ground.
I wonder if you’re giving up on Vista help too easily.
For example, your file extensions issue: I just now typed “file extensions” into Vista Help and Support. The very first topic was “File extensions: Frequently asked questions”. I chose that, and the fourth option was “How can I see file extensions in the file name”, which took me to a page that shows exactly what to do (which similar to the procedure I described in post #11).
Seems pretty helpful to me.
In retrospect this should have been in GQ since I started it mainly to rant, but now I realize that there were several useful tips. I had never heard of Windows Aero and now I now I have turned it off, so the results are much better. I could not find how to make it display filetypes and that information is in this thread. Thanks to those who gave this information.
Vista is bloatware, a horrible resource pig–and unstable as well. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s a 64 bit OS and there’s pretty good 64 bit driver support for it. Of course that driver support does not extend retroactively to older hardware so unless your entire system is brand spanky new that’s not actually an advantage. Personally, I infinitely prefer XP 64–drivers are harder to find but not impossible, it’s stable as hell, stripped down and lean/mean and AMD 64 bit processors love it to death. Since we have two AMDs at home and three at the office, XP 64 is a very much favored OS. Three of these machines shipped with Vista and nobody could stand it much more than a week before XP 64 got installed on them. Heck, if you really MUST have the Aero look and the sideways windows and all you can actually make XP 64 look identical to Vista but without the resource drain.
We have an older Intel box that we’re installing Media Center on to use as a home entertainment box–it was having some issues with network card support and Himself tried it with Vista for a while just to see how it did and the poor thing was so logged down you’d have to go off for a smoke break every time you tried to open an application. You wanna run Vista you better make sure you got shitloads of RAM and a very fast processor–it’s a Red Queen’s race, though, because you have to upgrade hardware like a mofo just to keep your box operating at the same apparent speed.
Fuck Vista… Linux is the next step as soon as XP 64 isn’t supported any longer.
And it would kill fucking Clippy to give us a reacharound? Just sayin’…
I tried that but XP was still intrusive, annoying and made it hard to find anything. I find Vista much easier to navigate.
This just doesn’t make any sense to me : XP is much more similar in layout to Windows 2000, then Vista.
It takes a lot more effort to make Vista look like 2000 then XP.
And then you will still need to search for a lot of things as Vistas menus are completely different from XP and 2000.
Me no like Vista.
Actually, our powerful Dutch Consumers Organization (can someone tell me what the USA equivalent is, by the way?) has collected 15.000 complaints about Vista from its members. Then they demanded that Microsoft would, if asked by the customer, install XP on new store-bougth computers. The reason given was that Vista as it was had so many bugs it really wasn’t a valid alternative to XP.
Microsoft in the Netherlands has officially refused the request, saying most complaints were about the earliest versions of Vista, and also claiming that Vista, in line with the demand of the Consumer Organization from last year, has more built in protection against viruses etc. then XP.
I never understand all the bitching about things like “It looks different” and “The menus are in different places” and “My 1987 copy of Lode Runner worked on Xp but it doesn’t on Vista” Vista must be inferior!!
It’s a NEW OS. If they wanted it to be XP+ they would have made it XP+.
I don’t really like the way the new start menu is laid out but other than that I’m ok with Vista. I REALLY like Office 2007 though. Alot.
Maybe Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports?
It’s not that they changed it, it is that they arbitrarily (probably spelled it wrong) changed things around.
Why do I have to work through 5 different sets of configuration pages to change something that would take me about 3 mouseclicks in XP?
If it was an improvement I would be all for it, but it just makes things overly complicated.
I finally just performed all those “10 tricks to make Vista behave like XP” and now it is running quite nicely, but it is a bit absurd that you need to almost hack Vista to get any performance out of it.
Isn’t this the same thing that everybody said when XP came out? I mean, like exactly? I’ll have to do a search some time for posts about XP when it first came out and come back later.
It’s been too long to remember the specifics now as after spending a while fighting XP I went back to Windows 2000 and stayed there until recently. I found XP extremely frustrating since nothing seemed to be where I expected it to be and I could not get the UI to stop annoying me with suggestions about what I might want to be doing. It felt like having Clippy as a constant companion. It could very well be that I just never found the off switches since it was so disorganized.
Vista, on the other hand, is organized much more rationally as far as I’m concerned and for the most part it shuts up and lets me do my work. If I could shut off the “command bar” in explorer I’d be even happier with it and I still need to find or write a decent file search replacement since that part sucks but overall it just works. I’m not sure I’d put it on an older system due to all the driver issues but for new hardware I really like it.
As the saying goes, only cashiers and wet babies like change.
That said, I like Vista. The only downside I have found as a computer tech is that vista seems to honor XP security moreso than even XP did.
Example: On many occasions trying to backup files by removing the HDD and plugging into another machine before a reformat/reload Vista steadfastly refused to takover ownership of folders/files and give me access even running as admin. In XP pro, you could basically say, I’m admin, this is my computer, show me files, viola, permission granted.
Why would I prefer an operating system where half my hardware won’t work (and in the case of my HP scanner which I bought new in 2003, their site claims will NEVER have a Vista driver, and they insult me further by linking me to their brand new scanners, expecting me to buy from them again), where some of my software won’t work properly, if at all, and the rest of it is slowed down…not to mention the 10+GB the base install takes up. Not to mention the other little annoyances, like the open file screen NOT using list mode…oh, but the interface is prettier! That makes it all worthwhile! /sarcasm.
XP all the way.
My two cents:
My roommate has a really bad ass 2 gig dual core AMD machine running Vista Premium. I have seen him lock it up several times, and my year and a half laptop that is only running one gig of memory and XP professional with dual core AMD chips boots faster and has NEVER crashed.
*We both use our machines to poke about the internet and for work and online grad school, he uses his to play WoW as well.
Heh. Nice catch El Cid! 
File copying/moving/deleting from a non-Vista machine on the network is darn-diddly-arn slow.
Folder sharing doesn’t play well with Xbox Media Center.
I sometimes get a weird graphical artifact thing when I start up Bioshock. (Nope, it’s not heat, really.)
That said, I’m fairly pleased with it. I’ve learned to cope with or work around the above. I wouldn’t say I prefer it to 2000 (which I was using at home) or XP (which I use at work), because I turn off all the bells and whistles to the point where all my Windows systems pretty much look and act the same, but it does what I want it to, and that’s all I ask.
Remember the lexmark imaging program I mentioned up thread? I didn’t mention that it came with the printer/scanner I got for Christmas (2006!) and they don’t plan to support Vista, either. I can’t even use the scanner because I haven’t figured out how to get the scanner to work with any other program that will run with Vista. 
I’ve NEVER understood why it was a bad idea to show file extensions. Isn’t it sort of important whether MYFILE is a TXT file or EXE file? Why withhold information? Sure the icons are different but only if you know what you’re looking for. It makes tech support suck a lot when people can’t see the file extensions.
tbdi, if you didn’t like XP but turned off all the fancy bits in Vista, couldn’t you have just done the same thing in XP? You can make XP look like Win2000. And to me the organization in Vista is terrible, although I’m used to XP.