I previously wrote that I was looking forward to Vista. I was. But, now I’m not. XP is good enough and Vista is terrible. Its slow, bloated, won’t let you play music and doesn’t offer one iota of interesting new functionality. It’s like having Microsoft Bob and Clippy and a bunch of security holes.
Now, to all you Microsofties out there that read this blog, I hear that when you give an honest Vista review like this one, Microsoft sends bloggers like me a new laptop to evaluate Vista and help us better understand the true value of Vista. I could be swayed. But for now, unless Microsoft can help me understand again why I might someday want to install that hopeless piece of garbage, I have to retract my previous “looking forward” statements, and I no longer recommend Vista to my vast subscribership.
Update 01/03/07: Since I’ve had a few comments on this, it’s clear my sarcasm is undetected. This post is a joke. I just want Microsoft to send me my free reviewer’s laptop, and then I’ll sing and dance for Vista. Until then, no recommendation for Vista!!
I’m running it at home and at work. I’m doing so out of a professional need to understand the user experience on the platform more than from a burning desire to possess Vista.
Having said that, I’m not unhappy with it. Is it 5 years of progress? Heck no.
It finally does have support for no-execute (NX) on stack and heap pages (enabled only for services by default. But you can turn it on for everything, and I have. No problems so far). I would upgrade an OS just to get that single feature.
Most annoying bit so far? Visual Studio 2005, the current production development environment from MS “has known compatibility problems” with Vista, according to the scary dialog box that pops up every time you try to run it. That’s so incredibly lame. There’s a prerelease version of a new development platform that was released to MSDN the week before Christmas. I haven’t tried it out yet. Having said that, MSVC05 has worked just fine for everything I’ve asked it to do. Heck, I’m compiling with MSVS.net03. That works. Of course, if simple compilation at the command line didn’t work, the OS would be so hopelessly broken I’m not sure what I would say.
Oh, and I’m finding I have to run some of my day to day programs (like NX) as administrator or face a barrage of dialog boxes throughout the day. And I have to start NX about 5 times. It crashes the first 4 times, but works fine on the 5th. Seems to be that after X crashes some sort of compatibility setting is applied that makes it work.
On my home machine, my firewire port isn’t supported for some reason. And one other compability problem that absolutely baffles me. My PS/2-connected mouse doesn’t work. Blimy.
But I’m still using it. Stay tuned.