So, it’s finally here. We’ve waited for 6 years, and the Microsoft finally unveils their newest operating system. Billions of dollars have been spent, years upon years of testing have been done. So, where do I start? Lack of 64-bit support? Lack of innovation? Well, they seem to go hand in hand, but the 64-bit issue is another article in itself – something that just isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon it seems.

Considering all the billions of dollars spent, you’d expect something that would completely change your computing experience, no? The main advance I see in Vista is that the GUI is accelerated. What does that mean? Well, now your desktop uses your video card directly to draw windows and everything else. All consumer computers now come with accelerated graphics cards. In the past, the cards were only really used when playing 3D video games, watching video, or showing a really cool screensaver. Now you can put your video card to use whenever you’re using Windows. You get better performance, and you’re getting your money’s worth out of the hardware. Mac had this functionality starting August 24, 2002 with their Jaguar release. Microsoft is only 4 years behind on this one. Linux has the functionality, but I still see vast improvement to be made making it easily installable and stable. When it does work in linux though, the results are nothing short of amazing, and it makes Windows Vista look like something your kids should be playing with.

As far as any other innovation goes, well, I simply don’t see any – at all. I’ve been using Vista for a few weeks now, and instead of innovation, I just get more frustrated. While there seems to be better support for hardware than Windows Professional 64-bit, I’m still confused as to why old 32-bit XP drivers won’t just work with Vista out of the box. It’s like buying a PS3 and not being able to use your hundreds of dollars worth of PS2 games – it just pisses you off. Sony can do it, why can’t Microsoft? Am I comparing apples and oranges? Software and hardware are different, yet it’s a lot more complicated to port software than it is hardware.  After all, you’re using the same computer you’ve used for years, so it’s not the hardware that’s changing. You can argue that it’s the vendor’s fault, but really what it seems is that Microsoft is doing this on purpose so that the public is forced to buy new “Windows Vista compatible” hardware. It would have been so much easier if Vista would just use XP drivers. Is it hard to do? Maybe, but that would just mean (gasp) Microsoft has done something innovative. I jumped through hoops to get my video card to accelerate (MSI GeForce FX 5900), and now I finally have my sound working right. It actually took me less time to get both my sound and video working properly in linux with editing configuration files and reading howtos than it did to get them to work in Windows. I still can’t sync my phone, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to in Vista, because the drivers are written for XP and the phone is no longer made.

Want to talk security? I don’t. In fact, I’m sick of it. If I want to configure anything, I have to acknowledge that I’m not a moron by clicking a button on a stupid little dialog box that pops up all the time. I got rid of it by disabling UAC (here’s how). While this may make my system “less secure”, at least I can be halfway productive without being bothered all the time.

The original Start Menu setup they had going on was extremely annoying. You have to click on Programs to be presented with a scroll box, where you’ll have to scroll down to run any programs that don’t start with the letters A or B. This is very frustrating if you’re not quite sure what the name of that program was in the first place. Instead of having everything right there in front of you, you have to scroll down, read, scroll down some more, read… Needless to say, I’m going with the “classic” start menu.

Icons. The only improvement with the icons is that now they’re vector graphics, and can be scaled up or down to your pleasure. Mac and linux have had this for years. Vista’s icons are just downright gosh-darn ugly in my opinion. They are too complex for a decent glance, and it really makes them look like little pieces of nothing when folders are viewed with small icons. The control panel icon looks like some sort of desktop LCD clock and folders look like yellow cereal boxes when viewed small. When viewed medium or large, none of the folders look the same. Apparently they look different depending on what kind of content is in them, which is something I really don’t need, because they’re all folders to me, and it’s just making them look even more complicated. Linux has had this for a while too, but from the icon sets that I’ve used, you don’t have to squint to see what the folder contains, and they didn’t look so darn butt-ugly. I’m not quite done with icons yet…

Zip files annoy me greatly in Vista. Not only does it take up to 3 times longer to decompress a zip file (I’m serious), but zip files look very, very similar to folders. So this means that when I download a zip file to my desktop and decompress the contents into a folder that has the same name, I’m then trying to figure out which one is the unzipped version, and which one was downloaded. Again with the speed. I know I don’t have a top-of the line computer, but honestly, it shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds to decompress anything under a megabyte, but it does.

What else? I could go on, honestly. Simple gestures would have been nice, like maybe a courtesy update to paint, which hasn’t been changed much in nearly 12 years. In fact, the software is so basic, if you used it for a class assignment or for a project at work, you’d surely get a scalding. For all practical purposes, it’s useless. Maybe Microsoft could take funding from one of their commercials and funnel it into a team of 3 or 4 people to create something else?

Where do you want to go today?

I wanna go somewhere else. Anywhere. Just never bring me back here again.

I finally found a free native Windows theme. It makes Windows XP (any version) look like Windows XP Media Center Edition, which in my opinion looks pretty cool. Download it here from Softpedia.com or google it. It comes zipped up, and contains an executable that will install itself in the right place. The zip also contains 2 backgrounds. As always, no spyware, no hassle, “no freakin crap”. Apparently this is a version that leaked out from beta testing, or something … whatever. Microsoft owes you and me both.