Ah had my first Vista experience! I am been doing some heavy debugging for the past week and have had to keep myself awake drinking 6 cups of tea a day. For the record I am not a heavy tea drinker, but I had to do it because the work load is a bit heavy. One of the machines I was debugging on happened to be a Vista machine. This is my first taste of Vista and, boy is the OS corny! The UI in true Microsoft tradition has been revamped. I was kinda expecting that, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. I have seen Linux boxes that looked slicker, but not bad on the whole.
It is the whole attitude of the OS that ticked me off. For one it takes me for a freaking dumb ass. The warning boxes are pretty nagging. Now, some people told me that they can be turned off, but even so I felt that the engineers have gone overboard. I can understand that safety is concern these days, but come on guys a box to ask me if a want to run an exe or copy a file is just too much. Even if you do want to, where are the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons. Why are you making me read “Do want to Move and Overwrite”, “Do you want to Move and Keep”, “Do you want to Move to Latvia” … every time I want to copy a file, bull shit let me do my job. I would like to ask Mr Gates, “Just because we use your OS, do you take us for a bunch of f***ing retards!” The OS kept nagging me like I was a 2 year old kid.
Another dumb message box for installation. The OS sounds a big alarm bell when you try to run any installation. Almost like an anti-virus program would when it detects a virus or a worm attack. Seeing the message box even scared me, and it was in-fact my very own installation package. For a moment I thought the installer was corrupted or infected by a virus. The next bad experience was when we tried to install VNC. No! Doesn’t work. Set a rule in the firewall, no, doesn’t work. Turn off the firewall, no, doesn’t work! Oh its our new Defender Service! Put a rule in the defender service, no, doesn’t work! Oh yes security, sorry we don’t allow programs like these to run. Please use our 1000$ Remote Desktop. Oh sorry, it’s not available for Home edition, buy our 10000$ Professional Vista Edition. Oh God getting VNC up and running was a nightmare. The OS is also a big resource hog. It was slow while pushing a lot of windows and applications on a AMD Turion 2.0 64bit, dual core CPU, which can run XP at comfortable speeds.
Eventually we did get everything working and the game ran with but the whole experience just left me with a very bad taste for Vista. There are many more things that got to me, but this rant has gone on long enough. Maybe I need some serious straight 8 hours of sleep. Looking objectively however, there is nothing special that Vista offers and I can’t think of 2 reasons to upgrade to it. The ONE reason I will have to upgrade to this naïve OS is DirectX 10. I know it will be punishing, but unless Microsoft comes up with DirectX 10 for XP, which I know will not happen, I will have to move to this OS ultimately. I hope sanity prevails and the service packs for Vista turn off the kindergarten nanny in the OS.
