May 3, 2008

A Year With Vista

It's been a year now that I have had Vista at home. I still use XP at work, and to be honest if it wasn't a serious pain to downgrade my work machine, I definitely would have a long time ago. And although this has been hashed out for more than a year now here are my thoughts on Vista.



For power users (i.e. everyone who instantly turned UAC off) I see no advantage to Vista, and there are a bunch of disadvantages. I never use the search feature (I turned off indexing a while ago because it never found anything I looked for except for shortcuts in the program menu and Launchy does that so much better. Aero looks nicer than the standard XP look and feel, but not that much nicer. Windows-tab was really cool for about 5 minutes, and then I never used it again. And the first thing I did was turn gadgets off, I highly object to giving up so much screen space (and I am running at 1900x1200). Apparently the start menu has improved, but I actually find it worse (it is far more work to keep clean and organized, which is something that I am adamant about).


Now, I've never had any real problems with Vista (except for some home networking quibbles in the early days), and there aren't any programs that I can't live without that don't run on Vista. It just seems to me like an unnecessary upgrade to me. Part of the problem is my lack of familiarity with it. I hate the new explorer. Maybe it is better for newbies, but it completely sucks for people who have spent their whole lives with the old explorer. It constantly thinks you are in a music folder when there is one sound file (or even not) in the entire directory. It sucks to the point where I have switched to xplorer2 (just the free light version as of yet). And my other big complaint, is the ridiculous amount of unnecessary services that Vista deems you want to be running. I am so comfortable in the task manager on Xp, I know what everything is there. After a year I still have no idea about quite a few Processes that are running on my machine, and list of Services (which I do admit is an improvement in the task manager) is daunting. I have no idea what I need to run, and what I don't. What Microsoft really needs is a tweak tool that is in between giving you no control and the services tab. Kind of simple questions like "Do you want to run remote desktop", "Is this a tablet PC", "Are you in a work domain", and such. Why things like Remote Registry, Tablet Input Services, DFS Replication are turned on by default on Home editions of windows is just plain stupid.


Anyhow, I think Microsoft completely dropped the ball on Vista. They added nothing of real value, spent 5 years creating that, and dropped or back ported to XP all of the big changes that were planned for Vista. Plus, the promise of gaming in Vista is a total disaster. After a year and a half there are still no games that use DirectX 10 to make the game look substantially better (maybe Crysis if you have some kind of supercomputer, but that is hack that got around with some registry tweaks). Gaming is still faster in XP, and there games for windows program is a joke. The Games browser is completely useless and I Games for Windows Live is a complete loss. $49.95 a year, for two games that support it? One of which is Halo 2 for PC, which sold, maybe 4 copies.


Rant out...