I suppose the din of Vista haters has been increasing lately to the point where I’ve actually noticed it. Lastw week, I read a blog post from my good buddy Jackson Shaw, who expressed his frustrations over Vista and IE7. And of course the technology press and analysts have been all over the apparent lack of "goodness" in Vista, what with analysts trying hard to outdo each other about recommending or not recommending organizations go to Vista. Well, and then there are those silly Mac ads that have been on forever. I like the Mac, but come on.

In any case, I figured I would break from my summer blogging hiatus to briefly blog about my own Vista experiences. Of course, as a Windows technology person, someone who writes and and develops for Windows, I’m going to have a particular viewpoint about things, but I wanted to try and blog as objectively as possible about my own experiences. I’ve been using Vista now for almost two years. I think I first installed it on my primary desktop machine when the first RC came out and have been running it steadily ever since. Here are some highlights

• I’m running it on a Dell server box that has a 16-bit video card wedged into an 8-bit slot (don’t ask). In all the time I have had it on this box, I have not had one crash,  or blue screen. And I install a heck of a lot of crap on my machine (add/remove programs currently reports 197 applications installed!)
• Application incompatibilities have been minimal. For those apps that did not work, I was generally able to work around it or get updates for the apps
• Driver availability has been good. The only thing I was not able to get working, was an old Motorola bluetooth adapter, and frankly I haven’t tried it again since SP1.
• The biggest gripe I’ve had with older versions of Windows is that, over time, they would get what I called "bit rot". Basically with more stuff installed and more crap on the hard drive, they would get slower and slower, to the point that I would typically have to re-image every year or so, which, I can tell you, is no fun with the amount of stuff I have on a typical system. I have not yet re-imaged my Vista system after almost 2 years and, while its not as zippy as it first was, it is still performing quite well. I will likely re-image it sometime in the near future, just to clear out some of the flotsam, but it won’t be because it has slowed to a crawl.
• From a usability perspective, I turned off Aero Glass a while back, after I got over the gee-whiz factor, and have not seen a need to have partially transparent windows since then. In fact, most of the whiz-bang UI things I rarely use or need. The things I need the most, which are apps to just run and for the desktop as a whole to respond quickly, happen consistently. The big thing I hated about XP, were those inexplicable hangs where the whole desktop would just decide to take a lunch break. I have had little to none of those on Vista. The only thing it occasionally does, which bugs the heck out of me, is fail to respond to my urgent requests to end some task. It seems to have to think about it, then try to tell Microsoft all about it before letting me do something. I would prefer a little less of that and a little more kill, kill, kill.
• Perhaps my biggest gripe of Vista is UAC and mostly because of the kind of work I do. I don’t like that, even as an administrator, UAC seems to block me from doing certain things unless I elevate privileges. And, whenever I build software intended for Vista, I have to worry about and work around customer problems with UAC. Usually, if something isn’t working, I tell the customer to make sure they are doing whatever they are doing from an elevated prompt, but that’s a pain. They need to make it easier for me to build apps that do that for them. Also, installations–I don’t want to have to always fire up and elevated command prompt whenever I want to make sure an installation is really working. Frankly, some of this may be my own lack of knowledge about how UAC works under the covers, but its just too complicated for my tastes.
• The other dev related issue I have with Vista is very particular. They have made it too hard for applications to store per-computer application-related data that a normal user can write to. If I don’t want to put app data in per-user locations then I’m stuck trying to work around the tighter permissions and UAC. That’s a pain and I don’t like it.

So, that sums up my Vista experiences. Overall I think Vista is a big improvement–from a speed, stability and security perspective, over XP. Just a few tweaks here and there and I think it would be a great OS. What do you think?

Tags 

Windows Vista