I have to excuse by being to positive about that system. Semantic reorganisation of the UI, more stability and a better kernel is great. But as i see after starting wit Windows Vista Microsoft’s OS became a not understandable bureaucracy out of hell. It’s real horror! Let me explain – Yesterday, I got yesterday my new company laptop:

WinDirStat on Vista

• Uninstaller. I needed about more than 1h to uninstall some little programs like MS Office, Acronis TrueImage, Acrobat Reader and so on. I was not able to launch multiple uninstallers or uninstall multiple programs at once. Instead i was forced to wait until an uninstall finished, then click around and launch the next one…I really ask you guys at Microsoft why yout have the really advanced Windows Installer 4.5, when no one uses it? Why do i have to monitor the uninstall process? Why i’m not able to do multiple uninstalls like in Linux? And why the hell does it take so long? – Okay you may say it’s the bad companies to blame! But i don’t understand why they had to pay for driver certifications? You could have put the same effort in a real package management!
• Setting up WLAN. It told me no networks could have been found. Probably the fault could be my laptop has an WLAN On/Off-switch. Oh really? Is that WLAN-assistant to dump to really scan for the error? I hate to handle with vague error messages! At last it was really just the on/off switch. Thank god!
• Notepad. Is this some kind of trademark? Or can someone explain why every beginner’s seminar in C++ or Delphi does better Notepads? At least it’s time to implement UNIX-line breaks and better char set-support!
• Explorer – What a horrible mess of a file manager!
  • Statusbar and Details bar. To enable the important status bar you first have to go to „Organise“ to enable the menu, then select „View › Status bar“ then hide again the menu. Oh wait! Since we had that menu why not enable that „details view“ that takes so much space. Shit. It’s not in the view menu. Maybe it can be disabled by right-clicking. Why do i have to enable/disable the menu?
  • Explorer Sidebar. Why does every explorer window launch with that damn sidebar? Why I’m not able to switch it off? Why can’t i tell it open with the favorites sidebar by default? Even the space it takes is too little to see something really effective. It’s not effective at all! The concept of this is not finished!
  • Favorites Bar. I thought let’s put your favorite folders to the favorites sidebar and use that explorer thing like Mac OSX Finder or GNOME’s Nautilus. But the favorites menu was gone! Maybe you could now drag that directory just the the favorites bar? No way. I had to go back one folder and then drop it to the favorites area.
• Task Manager. You still don’t see any command line or CPU-fraction or window-title but now have running applications. Still why should DAU Jones launch the task manager to kill hung programs? OK, now services are here. Oh goddammit! Why there are so many useless services fired up that actually have nothing to do?  There is no FAX!
• Copying or moving files: Oh it’s damn slow! I guess files are somehow check before copying. Nice concept, but i prefer to do such things fast than safe. UAC, virus scanner, checking for permission are all tings I don’t need. They are nice features, but not if you try to copy your old home folder via LAN to your new laptop. I just had about 730KB/s resulting an an estimated total time of 13h! Anyway, installing TeraCopy solved the problem by doing it with about 4,7MB/s via WLAN I can’t imagine checking the files or syncing for chances takes so long… Microsoft what have you done?!
• Drivers. If you have a Windows Vista with SP1 you expect the drivers to work. Anyway, my DVD-RAM drive was gone. Great! In the device manager it said the driver could not be loaded and put out code 39. It was time again to play code-bingo on the Microsoft’s bulletin boards where i found first found  a friendly „The question cannot be answered unless you go to technet and ask there. Also check out the…“ – whatever!A friend told me about the problem last week so i was able to fix it asap by removing the Upper- and LowerFilters in the registry. He also had another driver problem where he found by debugging the calls a nice pointer to NULL without any further descriptions. Ok, let’s again blame that bad driver coders. But wait! Why you just cannot fix the problem by just reinstalling the drivers? Is Microsoft again excusing again by ununderstandable details and disobey the concepts of good driver implementations?Anyway, i already felt like being in Ubuntu just that Ubuntu is logical and i usually get pro support by going to their free forums or just looking into the Wiki.
• Admin Authorisation Dialogs. I don’t know how you exactly call them, but they really bug me, especially when i cleanup the start menu. It just can’t remember that i give the authorisation just two seconds before or for what program i gave it. Linux and OSX does here fine and do not bug me. I understand the security concept behind it but even as admin user i get such windows. Yes, I am an admin i want to launch that device control panel. Damn you!
• Start Menu. Nice that i now can press the windows-key which sets my prompt to the search field in the start menu. But i don’t understand why it can’t use the index-service to find files within the start menu? Launchy can do better than that. Also, i miss the results grouped by type of information found. And why does it always show me the whole start menu? Can’t it just be like GNOME Deskbar or OSX Spotlight?
• Lags. I noticed some lags when the system did authentication and stuff. I don’t know what’s the cause, but i feel that these things increase over time. Once by showing me an authentication window it took about 1-2 to enumerate the users installed on the system. Oh no, it’s going to be damn slow…

Microsoft is obviously even to dumb to steal from Mac OSX or GNOME. I just can’t understand why a company with so many good people produce a bullshit of a system. Even if you look at the file structure it’s a mess greater than Windows XP.

I googled about performance and it was nice to see that video encoding is now faster? But after a colleague told me today his Windows Vista took about two minutes to start and the performance of copying files went to the ground and then even missed some files or just hung, i guess have to invest another 2h to install XP and basic drivers for my chip sets.

But do i still need Windows? WINE 1.1 is out and although it’s not perfect it runs. At least i don’t use windows programs that often. Perhaps i should really just install Ubuntu…well i don’t know, but Linux is definitely going to use the inner sectors  of the hard disk

UPDATE: Okay, Windows Vista is allowed to stay. SuperFetch and InstantOn/ReadyBoost is a great technology. Although i encountered a bluescreen (RADI driver fault caused by virus scanner while copying files over LAN?) it seems to run more stable. I still have some little problems with the new explorer and UAC is extremly bugging me. But i don’t want to  switch of these security feaures. In overall it is better than XP – excluding digital restrictions management – but sometimes it’s also really annoying.