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Loading ...IntelliAdmin put up a pretty good review of 5 things that are maddening about Vista and why it still sucks and I agree with every single one of them.
I’ve ran Vista since Beta 2, and RC2 and now RTM and I will sum up the entire Vista experience for you in a nutshell:
Vista is Windows XP, with incessant security-dialogs for every action you take, with a nice Theme, some UI effects and searching
That’s it… in a nutshell. There are some nitty gritty details and APIs that are different, but for 80-90% of folks that just want to “use” their computers to get work done, that is exactly what Vista is going to feel like. The first thing you will notice is that it looks very nice, they did a good job there. Then the second thing you will immediately notice is how many times a popup jumps infront of what you are doing to ask you to OK the action that is about to take place. If you are installing software, drivers or just copying files to certain locations you will likely be inundated with dialog boxes asking you to OK your action.
In addition to that, core design principles that made you crazy in Windows XP are still there in Vista. For example, if you upload files to a network share that is slow or goes offline, that will totally lock up the explorer process, which means all the other explorer (file browser) windows you have open will be locked up.
Additionally stupid defaults and even stupider behaviors run rampant just as they did in Windows XP (Constant notifications, focus-stealing notification popups and so on).
The icing on the cake of Vista is this dialog. This dialog completely sums up Vista, it’s design, it’s goals and who it’s catering to:
- What the hell is an “Indexed location”
- What are “non-indexed” files
- That the bar across the top is actually buttons
- That your menu bar is on the bottom-middle of the window
- That you have a search bar on your search results page… does that mean search within the results?
- What are tags? Who are authors?
- Why isn’t there a box to type some text into like Google?
- When I click E-mail to search, how come I don’t see my Gmail or Hotmail mail?
And the list goes on and on and on. This dialog really does a great job summing up Vista. It was developed by software engineers, for each other, in a furious rush as the project was stopped and restarted twice in a 6 year period and the end results? Well just look at the beginning of my post, it’s Windows XP again, with a nicer Theme, crazy security confirmation dialogs everywhere and all the same annoying design that made us confused and angry the first time through.
Update #1: Looks like Service Pack #1 for Vista is starting testing and will be due out Q2 of this year. There are rumors that SP1 won’t just be bug fixes but will include components that didn’t make it into the Vista RTM, like the PowerShell feature a lot of folks were waiting on.
Update #2: Looks like malware authors have ported their software (spyware, viruses, etc.) to Vista faster than security companies can port their cleaning applications. Joy.
Update #3: I’m not he only one that can’t get over the stupidity in Vista, Techgage’s Rob Williams did his top 8 annoyances in Vista and I agree with him.
Update #4: Scot Finnie sums up the core problem of Vista: it’s built to avoid complaints and to cater to enterprise customers. There is not much work in Vista that caters to user-based scenarios (please see the dialog I mentioned above), but there is a ton of work that (like UAC) that exists just so Microsoft can sit back and say “Hey, we made it secure, we can’t help it if you just click through all the dialogs). Really? Somehow Linux and Mac managed to not suck at this, but Microsoft takes a different tact and makes UAC the most obtrusive goddamn thing you’ve ever seen. How could you ever hand this off to your parents and say “Have fun with your new computer mom!”, she’d be calling you every other day asking what the dialog was about.
Update #5: Microsoft issues all invalid keys for the supposed “Ultimate Family Pack” deal they were running and there is no ETA for when new keys that work will be issued. So just incase you bought that pack, remember, go sit on a broom stick and wait for Microsoft to get back to you, but ultimately who cares? They have your money, sucker.
Update #6: PCWorld does a multi-page article on all the annoyances in Vista.
Update #7: Forbes did a piece on what a piece of crap Vista is. I have to say I agreed on every single point and ran across everything myself except for the CHKDSK after a bluescreen (I did run into bluescreens, just no CHKDSKs after)
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February 4th, 2007 at 12:48 am
Good God, I made a big screwup when I bought Vista this afternoon; well yesterday afternoon.
The experience installing, numerous times, Vista makes me remember very well experiences that I had in the early 1990’s with offerings such as Win 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, etc. BBBBBAAAAARRRRRFFFFF!
Vista is so bad that it doesn’t border on fraud: IT IS FRAUD.
I’m going back to Win 2000 or possibly XP. I have duly authorized copies by the way if anyone cares.
February 4th, 2007 at 7:45 am
What types of things did you notice that drove you nuts about the OS in particular?
I was amazed at some of the speed problems, like trying to *move* (not copy) a directory with a lot of files from one location to another… it’s just rediculous.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Yeah,,,preinstalled Vista means I have to shell out $200 to get XP on my BRAND NEW GD system,,,thanks HP you stupid turds….I should have had the option….Half my hardware that worked fined under XP is not supported in Vista,,and the vendors that make it have stated that they will not offer Vista updates,,,,oh well one flatbed scanner and one laser printer goes to the landfill…along with at least 5 of my most used software programs,,,but Vista does have nice dinging bells and other useless crap,,,,I hope Bills next prostate exam is due soon, and that Godzilla gets to wear the glove, Newton had it right..Apples are inspiring,, PCs just cause perspiring!!
February 7th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Hah, that’s brutal but I feel your pain.
February 7th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Vista is supposed to be a step forward for the “Digital Lifestyle” that Mac OS X started buzzing 3 years ago. Some cool “ground-breaking” features in Vista include:
Search. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but desktop searching has been around for a while - so now it’s integrated into the OS, fun. It requires you to annoying tag everything yourself with meta data. Groan.
Gadgets. Or widgets - as Apple coined them. The ones that come out of box are okay … the database of gadgets is horribly small and the quality is just not there. Seems the creative types are busy making widgets for Apple’s Mac OS X. This might change with time.
DVDs. Yes - now you don’t need to fork out extra money to watch DVDs on your computer, as the decoder is built into the OS now - no longer do you need 3rd party software to do what other OS users take for granted. Why did it take them so long to figure that one out. Sigh. And the “Wow” starts now — especially when you try to get onto the digital lifestyle - sync you Windows smartphone to your computer and are told “Sorry you don’t have Outlook installed.” But Windows comes with it’s own Mail, Calendar/Task, Contacts software now. Sorry - no… fork over the cash, who said the digital life style was free! M$
Glassy UI. The UI is nice - but it’s a big departure from usability. It looks pretty - but good luck trying to navigate and get stuff done. You’ll spend more time hunting for that elusive menu, peering for that shadow title bar (because black on grey works so well). It’ll make you bonkers.
I approve this reply. The last and most annoying thing - you have to constantly deal with the UAC (annoying security pop-up button). It doesn’t make your PC any more secure. Walk away from it and anyone can click the “I approve” button. Mac OS X will challenge you once for a session (which times out after a time) for the admin password. In a given 1 hour session I must click this pop-up 20+ times. I’d turn it off but then my systray Windows security agent icon keeps spewing out “Danger - you are in danger the UAC is off!!” message which are even more annoying.
February 7th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Nicholas,
That was a hell of a write up. A lot of good information in there and stuff I”ve personally seen myself. The UAC is a total joke. For any person that will be installing Vista for a parent or loved one that doesn’t know computers too well, my guess is 90% will simply turn off UAC before handing it over to the person, which naturally negates it completely.
Then to boot you have the complete disregard for design consistency across the UI and you are pretty much left stranded in a new environment where learning one skill won’t apply to every other area in the OS.
The synchronization issue is true testament to the Microsoft motto of “buy more, it’s not good enough”. You figure you drop $400 on Ultimate and want to plug your phone in and sync it… oh god forbit, time to cough up another $2-400 for Office so you can synchronize it. Not to shabby, $600+ to sync a phone and get animated menus… or $129 for Apple OS (assuming you own the hardware), or free for Linux (but then it’s a bit of mix and match to get the syncing working).
April 26th, 2007 at 4:28 am
add more ram
October 24th, 2007 at 5:44 am
Wow, Vista is beyond bad. You don’t even want to know what happens when you run a game.I mean seriously, why did they make such faulty software?!?!?!?!
December 24th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Vista IS the current ME. Why would anyone want to “freely” beta-test ideas for the next OS by Microsoft? Based square on the past; the next OS will be fine. For those wanting to: …have at it!
December 24th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Vistabul,
I think you are exactly right. Windows 7 or whatever they end up calling it, will likely be what Vista was *suppose* to be in the first place… and another $400
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
I hate vista and if I ever meet Bill Gates Im gonna rape him with a Pepsi bottle for causing me all this fucking stress!!! good day to all.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Go to the Pirate Bay and search for a torrent called Windows XP Pro SP2 Student. It’s Win XP without any of the WGA validation crap. I’ve been using it for about 4 years with No activation ever! I have a valid copy of both XP but am using the student version because of all the unjustified copyright garbage. Unjustified because MS has already made Billions off of XP yet they continue to bombard me with WGA crap!
April 1st, 2008 at 8:21 am
Roboto, interesting suggestion. Thanks for the heads up for any other folks out there that are curious.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I have a few very large issues with Vista, first of all (and this has been mentioned before I think) it takes more time to calculate how much time is remaining when you copy a file than it does to just fucking copy it….second of all, wtf takes so long about connecting to a wireless network, Ubuntu connects almost instantly every time, and vista take 60 fucking seconds to get an IP…please…thirdly have you every tried to use 2 net work interfaces, and two separate networks? Good luck, if they both don’t have internet, your DNS options will be screwed up. So gg vista for screwing up the most basic fucking functions of a computer.
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Mav,
Totally agree about the “calculating” thing, it’s so stupid. As for the wireless network, I have heard horror-stories, fortunately I”m on a wired network so haven’t had to deal with it… (but I’ll never throw Vista on my laptop)
April 24th, 2008 at 1:53 am
wow how i miss this article (nice, indeed, lol), my rss feeds probably didn’t update well that day
April 28th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Actually I like the UAC, but why can’t the user designate that some programs should always run as administrator and with no prompts?
The Vista’s design implementation of Shadow Copy is rough, as is Search. (But if you turn those off, it may cause problems installing other MS programs, such as MS Live Messenger.)
Both of those background services eat up hard drive access.
They make multiple copies of files, and automatically index and cache. You can’t control which directories it caches or makes multiple copies of files from. It appears to do the whole hard drive. Imagine this bloatware also competing for HD access w/Norton anti-virus (another piece of bloatware), and windows update and auto-defrag, and superfetch.
Imagine all these background pieces of “convenience” causing a traffice jam with the HD while doing a hibernation, or running while you are trying to copy a large folder of hundreds of files, and you quickly realize the brainless architecture problems.
Why can’t shadow copy be configured only to make backup restore points of the system, and/or only designated folders?
If alot of those services can be safely disabled and disabled from a more newbie friendly configuration interface, ( and without causing problems with other MS App installs), then Vista would probably run faster and more smoothly.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
JP,
Microsoft is coding to the “least common denominator” in Vista and Vienna (and likely from now on)… more specifically, they roll out a feature that can either be turned on, or off, but not configured and tweaked.
You see it everywhere in Vista, like the new Backup and Restore panel as well as the new Defragmentation tool… you can no longer control “details” of anything anymore.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:13 am
I can confirm that Vista sucks at copying or just moving large numbers of files. It always locks up while “calculating time remaining.”
The security dialogues are a constant annoyance. Battlefield Vietnam, Fallout 2, and I’m sure countless other games have graphical problems.
I’ve tried many times and many ways to get XP onto my laptop, but it just doesn’t work since the thing came with Vista. Fuck. FUUUUUUUCK!
May 14th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Faded,
Have you applied SP1 of Vista yet? It sort of helped with the copying-taking-forever stuff… I don’t know if it will help those games thoughs… such is the wisdom of Microsoft (to kick it’s user’s ass)
And now that SP3 is breaking Windows XP copies all over the place, it seems there is no perfect Windows OS anymore.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
in xp you could just type the word you’re looking for in a saved email on cd in the 2nd box but now in vista no matter how you change the search options, indexes, etc, it will not find it even if it’s a snake staring right at it.
ITA, i have vista twice and it does suck!
they should offer us free upgrade to whatever os is next for having to put up with this crap.
yes, i have xp also.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Disclaimer: I work at MS, but not on the Windows team. These opinions are my own, I have no clue if the windows team actually had similar rationalizations. Also I’m not an expert on operating systems so the technical stuff wont be 100% accurate, but close enough for the purposes of this comment.
I’ll try and shed some objective light on few things people are bitching about.
1. Drivers
Anyone with half a brain can figure out why device manufacturers don’t care about updating their drivers. There can be only one reason - Drivers don’t help sell products, not by themselves - The ONLY thing they care about is selling their product. We, AFAIK, have made public the Driver model spec well in advance, and haven’t done any last minute “switch” to keep device vendors hanging. There simply wasn’t a huge push in the industry to write vista drivers before Vista RTM’d. Drivers are very hard to get right, the technically inclined would know they run in kernelmode/ring-0, making them a cause of system crashes, more than anything. I can say with 90% certainty that almost all BSODs in XP and Vista can be attributed to the combination of terrible drivers, failing RAM, or one of those godforsaken copy protection schemes that some games install as low level system components.
2. Malware (excluding viruses)
OK, this is slightly ambiguous, there are all kinds of malware. But abstracting from the different kinds, all it boils down to, is running a piece of software in user-mode, which has for all intents and purposes the same rights as other software. The fact that a lot of people are stupid enough to run any software that they find in their emails is kind of the point. Nothing can prevent that. Anti malware just a glorified un-installer. Ofcource there are all kinds of sneaky malware, some easy, some hard to remove.
3. UAC
The fact that UAC keeps on annoying users is actually a yard stick to measure competency of the software developers of any particular software. Unless it *has* to modify the system in a critical way, there should be no need for a software to require admin privileges. (How often do you guys install drivers? Once a week?) After years of cultivating bad habits, all devs take running as root granted, and its hard to change bad habits. One way is to take the heat by putting a roadblock like UAC, which is annoying and frustrating, that gets people to redesign their software to a better standard. Some of these bad habits : Writing user config/setting files/data to Program Files , or %SystemRoot%\System32 when “Documents and Settings” exists for this specific reason will cause UAC annoyance. Ofcource Vista itself generates those UAC popups, some of which , i agree ,are overkill.
4. DRM.
This is the biggest non-issue, if ever. DRM can be avoided by -> not buying DRM content. Anyone who thinks DRM is causing “slow” performance or any other such nonsense should be politely asked for evidence, failing which I would personally label aforementioned sentiments as trolling. Especially those that want you to switch to OSX because of this. (”LOLZZ DRM makes ur computer slow, thats why I switched to a mac”) An argument can be made to switch to OSX, and I’m fine with people switching, as long as both sides are accurately represented (kind of impossible but.. w/e -_- ). Apple is the biggest supporter of DRM with their iTunes store, and locking-in people with to the iPod (No, I dont want to Burn CD’s in iTunes and rip them again. Thank you very much). I like the iPod, but no way in hell am I purchasing any DRM crap from ITunes or to anyone else for that matter.
G’Day !
July 8th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Fake Bill,
Great reply and I think you covered a lot of the lower-level details that people bitch about, however I think the reasons that end-users hate Windows Vista so far are:
* It’s different for no reason
* It’s illogical - reading how it took 6 months to design the start menu and they finally ended up with the piece of shit that is there now gives an amazing level of insight into the “design by government organization” type of development occuring at Microsoft pre-Vista.
* The user interfaces for a lot of the OS are either so damn dumb they are unusable or so overly complicated that they are again… unusable (like the screenshot in this post).
July 8th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I found one upside to Vista. When I went to buy my last desktop I knew I didn’t want Vista, and Microsoft was pushing Vista so hard that Fry’s had to call a brand-new still-in-the-box HP desktop with XP “refurbished” and sell it to me at half price. Not that running XP is much to gloat about, but it still beats the crap out of Vista.
Unfortunately, I have Vista on my laptop and it’s ridiculous. If the laptop goes to sleep it can no longer find the network it was using just fine moments before, and I have to shut down completely and reboot to get online. Meanwhile my wife pops open her Macbook and is online in seconds. The authorizations are truly silly on an epic scale. My record so far is six administrator authorization/confirmation screens for one click on an install dialog. SIX!! WTF?? These were not for separate sections of an install! They were six in a fucking row following one button click!!
July 9th, 2008 at 6:55 am
zazugrey,
Those are awesome examples of Vista; I like the 6-UAC-dialogs, I think I’ve only gotten to 4 before for a single action, but really that is gold.
You have to appreciate that Unix and Mac have been doing this a different/less intrusive way for 20 years but Microsoft has decided that they are going to “force good practices” on everyone with a mechanism that helps no-one that they invented during some brain-storming session.
Brilliant.
Let’s see how Vienna pans out, I *assume* it will be a lot better, but likely more intrusive as well.
September 13th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
it amazes me that quite a few people actually said they liked vista in reply to another popular blog entry: http://www.breakitdownblog.com/why-vista-sucks/
I suspect they are either shills or genuine idiots that vista was originally designed for. The other day i walked into a bookstore and noticed that there were so many people browsing at titles at the “for dummies” section, and this got me thinking: right, there so many fools and suckers around in the world, and *they* don’t think vista sucks.
Unfortunately for the rest of us who are more intelligent, vista is just not designed for us.
September 13th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Wanna hear a joke? Vista! But on a more serious note… You know, I am actually liking this site. Surprisingly, I found it on google. Anyway, With the DX10, only through vista (Or some russian computer group), and DX9L (Microsoft’s way of saying, hey DX9 was a good upgrade, but this one is even better! Plus it’s only for vista!), the oh so ever persistent security messages, glossy appearance trading off for the 20 min start-up, and with a few other things closely put together. It makes for a quite spectacular downgrade. In fact, I have seen printers that actually require 128 megs of RAm from Xp, but 512 for Vista. So that next version of windows better be windows xp, just more organized. If you did that microsoft, Windows would no longer be a joke.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
i h8 vista so bad my computer bought brand new 5months ago is going in the garbage how stupid java dosent work worth shit neither do any worth while programs i was actually excited when i got my comp now i wish i never purchased it in the first place anyone have any ideas because im done with this big piece of crap waste of money$ others make money selling shit like this please actually check the products b4 sending them out on ppl who actually give a crap about the things they buy.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Its been over a year since I got my Rig. I have it triple boot (Vista/XP/Ubuntu) because I found vista so unbearable I had to install XP just so I could run it.
I still cant use my 24 bit creative X-fi cuz vista cannot run the driver & the audio software. This leaves the HTPC capabilities of the PC in the dust.
I cant watch Netflix online movies, because seems like Vista+SP1 has some incompatibility issues with netflix media player.
I cannot run X windows inside cygwin, because it crashes on startup.
I cannot run VNC Server, because it crashes when a user tries to connect to it.
There quite a few games which crash, sometimes right before saving progress at 90% level completion.
The list goes on, hence I reboot and login to XP.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
some people are just too stupid to have computers