Hasta La Vista

Today I had my first hands on experience with Windows Vista - and it left me with rather a bad taste in my mouth.

I was installing a nice new 2.8ghz Core Duo Dell PC with 1gb or RAM which came shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium installed. The persons old PC was a gnarly, 1990s pentium brick running Windows 2000 which had developed a hard disk fault. Luckily it would still boot and the person managed to get all her critical stuff off it before I arrived.

My first impressions of Vista were quite good but I soon got bogged down with the much slated User Account Control (UAC) interrupting my every move with a “did you really want to go into that control panel item?” type message that you have to click through every time you go anywhere near something configurable. I can see why people are saying that although this is “good security” it is the weakest point as people will just turn it off!

Even though the machine was brand new and pre-loaded with the typical stuff you get on an OEM PC, it soon gave a few error messages and application crashes along with nice new “fwips and dings” instead of the old windows “gnnnnn!” error. Its all just glitz really. Not much appears to have changed from XP. Even when using Vista you notice that although the folder icons in explorer look different and no longer have the + and - next to them, and instead show you a little arrow in the bottom corner of the expanded folder, other parts of the OS still have the XP and Windows 2000 style icons. To me it looks like the retarded bastard son of Linux and XP running some sort of shell replacement like WindowBlinds.

After 4 hours of transferring files between the old PC (via USB1.1) and the new one I just found the Vista interface to be confusing and complicated. Too many menu items, too many different images representing slightly different types of folders and little inconsistencies all over the place. I even plugged in a Logitech USB webcam only to be told that Vista could not install the drivers. It kindly suggested that I could go to the Logitech website to get some drivers, which I did, only to be told that the Webcam was not Vista compatible. I went into Device Manager (after again telling the UAC robot that I really did want to do this as I clicked on the freakin icon!) and right clicked the device and updated the drivers. It went off and downloaded some drivers off the internet and worked immediately! What the hell was that all about?

I also ran into issues installing Office 2003 from a CD. UAC asked for my permission to run the setup program which I gave. This is normally followed by a menu application where you can choose what to install (Office pro, Visio etc) but this complained when I clicked on the link to Office Pro that it “needed elevation” to run. I thought I have already done that though? It did’nt stop me going into the folder and running the Office Pro setup.exe direct though.

I was thinking of upgrading to Vista Home Premium on my desktop PC but I think I might hold off for now. Coming back home to my MacBook again was like purging my soul and banishing the demons from my brain.

I have just fallen in love with Apple all over again.