Yeah it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy.

I just finished spending a full month with the newly released Windows Vista and boy do I have quite a bit to say about it. To put a long story short, I’m now using Windows XP once again. As most of you imaginary readers know, Vista is in and of itself a culmination of over five years of effort on the part of Microsoft to follow up on their previous consumer OS release, Windows XP. Though controversial, due to its newfound copy protection, Windows XP is widely considered to be the latest success in the line of ever evolving operating systems produced by the software giant of Redmond, Washington.

Windows XP was far from perfect, though it is safe to say that it has ended up a better OS than it started as. Windows XP is like that pair of good ole reliable shoes that you just can’t seem to find a reason to get rid of. As I came to find out, Windows Vista is like the new pair of overpriced shoes you just brought home only to find that they were undersized, overrated, uncomfortable and generally designed for somebody that had already lost most of the sensation in their feet.

As anybody from Microsoft will tell you, there are a lot of new things in Vista. There are a few upfront in your face changes such as the new Aero UI and most importantly UAC. Most of the changes that are generally referred to are behind the scenes types of changes that you as an end user will only notice over time rather than straight away (if at all). I suspect the new glitzy UI is going to be the single feature that motivates the majority of Windows Vista upgrades.

However beyond the new UI, there is Vista’s most potent feature which is known as UAC. UAC is essentially Microsoft’s way of trying to further secure Windows in an effort to stem the never-ending tide of malware and nastiness that has plagued the Windows platform over the last few years. Now I personally do not lay the blame for the army of spyware apps that make their way onto Windows machines each day at Microsoft’s doorstep. Time has shown again and again that computer users in the majority will continue to treat their computer as an appliance rather than a tool. In doing so, they avoid maintaining the proper level of respect for that tool and this results in the poor practices that have led to so many computers being infected with this garbage.

What I do blame Microsoft for is UAC. UAC is nothing more than a misguided attempt by Microsoft to stem this problem and other security related issues by a) annoying the living shit of the users and b) putting even more responsibility into the hands of those that have shown no interest whatsoever in taking responsibility. Every time a user (regardless of the privileges assigned to them) does something that would require admin level permission, UAC performs one of the following actions:

  1. Modifies the action so that it no longer requires admin privileges. For example if I have an application that can be run by a user/admin and that application attempts to modify/create a file located within its own application directory, UAC will redirect the results of that change to a virtualized version of that applications directory stored within the users profile. This not only breaks massive amount of compatibility with many existing applications (though UAC attempts to hide the redirection in every way possible), it creates a number of unique problems with applications that operated perfectly fine and within the normal bounds of security standards on Windows XP and Windows 2000.

  2. Prompts the user to either confirm the action by clicking Ok or by logging in. The specific action that UAC takes is dependent upon the privileges the user in question already has. If the user has admin level privileges, UAC only requires a click of the Ok button to proceed. Otherwise UAC will require that the user provide credentials for the task at hand. This part of UAC sounds decent enough on paper, but in practice it can be mind-numbingly annoying.

UAC also imposes odd decisions about what kind of things can be done on a system. For instance I cannot copy files directly from a network share into a directory located anywhere within the Program Files folder on the system drive in a Vista system. UAC simply will not allow it. Instead I have to copy the files off the network share into a folder on my desktop (or somewhere within my own profile). I can then copy the files from that folder in my profile to the Program Files location. This has got to be one of the stupidest design decisions I’ve ever seen. It boggles the mind how many overpaid project managers at Microsoft actually signed off on such a steaming pile of shit. Not to mention the millions of ways a seedy mind like mine has already come up with for circumventing the stupid protections offer by UAC. The biggest issue with UAC is that it circumvents the basic security concepts already present in the system. If you want to deny users write access to files/folders located in the Program Files folder, make use of default ACLs to do this. Building a secondary service that circumvents those ACLs and dozens of other basic security concepts already present in the system (not to mention relied upon by millions of programs), is short-sighted and foolish in the worst sort of way.

Beyond UAC, Vista itself is a mangled mess of new and reused ideas. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are only good because they help you avoid the bad ones. Some are just okay. For instance Microsoft decided to redo the start menu in Vista. Instead of having the selections for sub menus fly out in additional menu levels (as we have seen in every version of Windows since 95 and prior to Vista), Vista will “cleanly” replace the contents of a predefined pane of the start menu with the new sub-menu. Like most ideas in Vista, this sounds good on paper. However it can be quite annoying. I realize that this particular complaint of mine will be a source of contention for the couple of people who end up reading this because the reality is that most users end up with a massive amount of start menu clutter in current versions of Windows. That’s because most users don’t want to take the responsibility of organizing their system appropriately. Start Menu clutter has never been much of an issue for me as I place all of my program entries into category menus that I create. So for instance I have a menu for Networking applications, another for Games, another for Office stuff and yet another for Development tools. This strategy has worked quite well for me throughout the years and doesn’t take a whole lot of time to implement. The Start Menu fly-outs work well for me because I can see pretty easily what is available on a system (not just mine either). In Vista I have to scroll through the list and browse the sub-menus independently of their parent entries. This is annoying.

On the flip side, Vista adds a wonderful feature to the Start Menu that allows you to start typing the name of a program or a recently accessed network location and/or document and it will automatically display those entries. This is surely using Microsoft’s over-rated Windows Desktop Search tech in the background, which has gotten better over the years but generally is still in need of work before it sees real production use for myself. One of the few annoyances in the Start Menu search is that it seems to be finicky about what you type and how you type it. For instance if an application called “Microsoft Word 2007” is in the start menu, I can start typing Microsoft, Word or 2007 and it will appear. However if I type ord or icrosoft or something to that effect, generally the item cannot be found. That can be annoying as a missed letter can mean the difference e between finding an app and not finding the app.

Another downer is the new Explorer interface in Vista. It feels clunky and unintuitive when compared to the current interface in Windows XP. However I will concede that this may be in part due to the fact that the interface in XP is derived directly from the interface introduced in Windows 95 and has simply evolved rather nicely over the last 12 years. I do not think my month spent using Vista on my laptop gives me enough experience to say for certain whether or not the interface would end up being more useful given enough time to come to terms with the fact that it is quite different.

One of the pluses in Vista is the new Aero interface. While many geeks like myself consider Aero to be a total rip-off of similar effects pioneered in OSX nearly 7 years ago, it is still refreshing to see a bit more glitz and glamour in Windows. However as you may have imagined, even this feature doesn’t come to the door without some baggage. For instance one of the biggest annoyances I have with Aero is how when running certain accelerated applications in a Window, it will turn itself off and revert to the ugliness that is the Vista Basic interface. I’ve heard a number of technical explanations as to why this happens from various Microsoft sources, but none of them have taken the time to really honestly and truly explain just how OSX and run along and not even skip a beat when accelerated applications are run within a Window, while Vista tends to skip the makeup and come into work looking rough. On top of all this, Microsoft is actually selling a version of Vista (Home Basic) without the brand new UI. This is an obvious attempt by Microsoft to sell a higher priced version of Vista to most people yet be able to say that they offer some version of Vista for $100.00 at retail.

Since I’ve brought up the subject, if people thought the Fisher Price like theme of XP was ugly, then they haven’t seen anything yet. I challenge you to use the aesthetic mess that is the Vista Basic interface and not come away with a feeling of disgust. It is a horrid mix of black and blue. It makes me think somebody snuck into my office and slapped the computer around when I stepped out to grab a bite to eat. In fact, Vista Basic is so damned repulsive, I’ve started switching back to the classic Windows UI (think Windows 2000 & 2003 here) when forced to run Vista in virtual machines for compatibility testing now. It may not be pleasing, but at least it offers a small level of familiarity to a strange man in what seems to be a very strange land.

Okay, so I’ve done some bashing so let me take the time to enumerate some of the smaller features that I really appreciated. One of my favorites was the Reliability and Performance monitor. This is a wonderful utility that should’ve been included in versions of Windows long ago. In some ways it is similar to the task manager, but it goes the extra mile to really let you see what is happening in your system. Not only can I see exactly what is eating up my processor cycles and memory, but I can also identify applications that are eating my network bandwidth and responsible for large amounts of disk access. This is functionality that generally had to be provided through the use of third party applications by companies like Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft which I’m sure is no coincidence here) and it’s nice to see Microsoft take system accountability to the next level by giving us the ability to see exactly who is doing what.

At first I thought the sidebar was a total waste of time and effort. However after downloading some community gadgets, that damned thing really started to grow on me after awhile. It was nice to have an integrated way of display things like processor/memory usage, wifi information and various other pieces of information at all times. There is already a plethora of gadgets out there and more and more are sure to pop-up as Vista begins to inevitably dominate the PC landscape.

Okay now that I’ve been a bit more even-handed (though to be honest this is a negative review of Vista, so don’t expect too much of that), let’s get to some more annoyances.

I’ve encountered a large number of outright bugs in the system itself. It took me six tries to map to a network printer on my home network without the Vista Spooler service crashing and forcing me to manually restart it before trying again. That was a real pain in my ass. On the sixth try, I was able to map my network printer and all was well with the world. Yet another annoyance: The integrated XPS viewer (Microsoft’s so-called PDF killer) is inherently broken. If you change your default browser from Internet Explorer to something a bit more sensible for everyday use like Firefox or Opera, you’ll find that double clicking an XPS file no longer works. That’s because the XPS viewer application is actually some app that just redirects the file to the default browser. In reality Internet Explorer itself is the XPS viewer and changing your default browser causes the XPS viewer “application” to send the request to the wrong browser. As Napoleon Dynamite would say, “IDIOT!”. This can of course be solved by doing what Microsoft should have done to begin with: Set IE as the default application for XPS documents.

One of my favorite bugs centers around Vista new and improved Network Connection Center (or whatever the hell they call this mess of UI nastiness). You see one of the things Vista attempts to do is to consolidate management of all network connections in the OS into a single interface. It also attempts to be smarter than the user (which admittedly in some cases isn’t a bad idea). So connecting to a VPN, a wireless network or your Ethernet network requires that you go through the same UI. In theory this isn’t a bad idea. Though somebody forget to factor in the cluttered and confusing nature of the UI and the fact that the new UI forces me to take more steps to accomplish the same task that took fewer clicks, less time and less effort in Windows XP.

Oh wait, you are waiting for an actual bug to be detailed, correct? Yes – I was just getting to that. One of the ways Vista’s Network Connectivity Center tries to be smarter than the user is in detecting whether or not any of the current network connections provide internet access or just local area access. So if I’m connected to my buddies ad-hoc network or the managed wireless network I’m connected to provides only LAN access, then there are certain things Vista won’t let me do such as connecting to a VPN. Well they managed to screw this up too. The detection seems to work fine most of the time, but I’ve seen it seemingly loose sync enough so that suddenly I find myself in a position where I can browse the internet, yet Vista claims that I do not have an “internet connection” per-se and as a result Vista refuses to allow me to connect to a VPN.

Another annoyance with Vista is the extremely granular nature of it. There are so many different of editions of Vista floating around between here and Europe that I just can’t keep up with which version has what and which doesn’t. The version I specifically used for the last month was Vista Business Edition as that was the version Microsoft provided to me for free for participating in their Power Together online promotion. I can only count my lucky stars that I didn’t have to run out and pay a full $300 for this edition or god forbid $400 for the Ultimate edition to figure out that Vista isn’t exactly what Microsoft is advertising it is.

Speaking of which, since I assume nobody is left reading this multi-page rant crammed into a news post on the front page of my rarely updated website, where the hell is Vista’s advertising at? For what I understand, Microsoft blew half a billion dollars on the marketing of this product and from what I can tell, there has been very little actual advertising. I’ve seen a handful of TV spots, most of which just show the Vista Flip3D effect after showing a video clip of something entirely unrelated and different (more often than not some other commercial). Now of course whenever you walk into a computer related store, the stench and sight of Vista related marketing becomes apparent unless you are either blind or dead in which case Vista might actually meet your needs as a user. Still it is very hard to believe that Microsoft is getting their moneys worth for that half a billion dollars. I can’t imagine Apple is spending nearly that much on those sometimes inaccurate yet hilarious PC/Mac commercials of theirs. Have you seen the Vista one? It’s the best description of UAC you’ll get before engaging with it yourself.

I thought the point of advertising a product like Vista was to get the consumers of the world fired up and give them a reason to run out a purchase a new craptacular computer preloaded to the brim with things like Vista, AOL, and a lot of software that probably should be classified as spyware/adware but isn’t because the wheels have been greased in the right places. Afterall, isn’t that where the bulk of Vista sales are expected to come from? So pray tell, why is it that Microsoft has done very little advertising to anybody not already in a computer store? I suppose this is why the idiot-in-charge, Ballmer himself had to recently tell analysts that their projections for Vista sales were too aggressive. Funny thing – their projections were based on his assertion a mere month ago that Vista would sell like hotcakes. What an IDIOT!

More often than not nowadays, it seems as if Microsoft’s understanding of the what the consumer wants/needs is lacking. We’ve seen this trend on a number of product fronts and Vista is the latest to fall to the disease of bureaucratic incompetence that is taking Microsoft over by storm with Steve Ballmer leading the charge. On the flip side Microsoft is still putting out some good products in the form of the XBOX 360 and the recently released Office 2007 (though even that isn’t without it’s issues but at least I’m able to use my free copy of it to type this article). You need to look no further than products like the Zune (and not just that shit brown model they have out there) to start getting a feel for just how much out of touch Microsoft is nowadays.

I for one hope they can turn it around, but being pessimist by trade, hope isn’t exactly a strong trait of mine. Maybe they will prove me wrong. Maybe not. Only time will tell. For the time being, I would wait for the first Service Pack (perhaps even the second) before giving Vista a serious look. XP is a supported product until 2010 last time I checked, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. So sit back, relax and take joy in the fact that you didn’t just flush your money down a toilet.