100 Reasons You’ll Be Frustrated
100 Reasons You’ll Be Speechless
Oh yeah? Not in my experience with Vista. Here’s what I have to say about Microsoft’s top 100 reasons why everyone’s so speechless.
1. It makes using your PC a breeze
Not if you’ve grown accustom to things being obvious places. One example being the oh-so-XP-(and earlier)-esque Display Properties panel that Vista broke into multiple pieces and hid throughout the operating system. So much of the old OS sticks out like a sore thumb in the new OS.
5. It can find your stuff
Good, ’cause I sure can’t. Where the heck did the “File Edit…” bar go? (yeah yeah, I know you can press alt to make it appear. Not very intuitive though).
15. Because your PC remembers to back up for you
That is, unless the backups fill up the drive they’re saved on. Backup and Restore center should be smart enough to keep the latest version and scrap older backed up versions when the drive gets full. In my experience, Vista chooses to simply stop backing up instead. Smart move. The backups are also in a series of odd-named zip files. In my opinion, a decent backup solution should let me into my backup files w/o needing to extract them all out of zipped zip files.
17. It’s like having your own personal anchorman
Thanks to the good folks at Konfabulator (now Yahoo). Widgets, Dashboard, Gadgets… it’s all be done. Hardly something new to brag about, Microsoft.
20. Set up your home network in a flash
… If you’ve got everyone on the Vista train. Doesn’t play will with Mac or Linux… not in “a flash”, at least. Don’t even get me started on Printer Sharing.
24. Because you don’t want to worry about spyware
Worry? First thing we do with a new system is patch it and protect it with anti-spyware and anti-virus. Of course we worry about it. I trust Windows Defender just as much as I trusted Windows XP. Sorry. Problems and holes in Windows is primarily *why* we worry about spyware and such.
31. Because your PC lets you know if something’s wrong – and helps you fix it
Errors I’ve gotten still say things like “Unexpected Failure – ” then lists some hex code. That’s helpful… if I was a Microsoft engineer. Other errors include “Internet Explorer has stopped working. Tell Microsoft about this problem”. If I tell Microsoft, will they send someone over to fix the problem? If not, “… and helps you fix it” isn’t completely true, is it.
45. Because you hate all those boxes and wires
Isn’t this a hardware feature more than a software feature?
50. Get more out of the web
Tabbed Browsing in Windows Internet Explorer 7
Finally IE has caught up with the rest of the browsing world (not new news though). I give IE7 a bit of credit, it’s not half bad. Still has a long way to go with CSS3 and better PNG support, to name a few.
63. Help is always available
Funny about the help. I had to fix my own OS setup so that the Help files used the correct CSS file. They looked totally out of place w/o the stylesheet. Not only that, they’ve got a “We’ll walk you through it” feature that will open windows for you and show you each step of the way to where you want to go. It showed me like 7 steps to get to the Folder Options so I could “Show Hidden System Files”.
I can’t comment on all of the reasons, even the ones that are repeated as “fillers”. Needless to say, I’m not as thrilled with Vista as I wanted to be. It has potential, but not as much as Microsoft is making it out to have. Pretty, but not a contender. If you’re in the market, I suggest you wait for SP1 (and some reviews to ensure SP1 has cleaned it up a bit).
Update: I should probably list this somewhere else, but another annoyance I have with Visa is it’s refusal to do what it’s told. I can’t say how many times I’ve confirmed and re-confirmed that my sleep setting is set to 20 minutes… and Vista seems to ignore that and won’t *ever* sleep unless it’s done by hand via the Start -> Shut Down menu. So frustrating and not very good for my energy bill.