Windows Vista. The newest offering from Microsoft. Software just very recently released from a company that has a bad habit of releasing software that needs to be out a year or two before it’s stable. Naturally, I decided to install it on my brand new, super awesome computer. Why? Mainly because I had a free copy lying around and wanted to give it a test drive so that I could tell other people what I think.
Yes, you read that right. I care so much for your well-being that I installed a Microsoft product on my computer. Now, when you come up to me and ask me “I was thinking about getting Vista, what do you think?” I can respond without simply making broad generalizations about how Microsoft steals everything from Apple, always writes insecure stuff, and Windows generally needs to be avoided, especially if the version hasn’t been baptized in the fire of a thousand hackers and virus writers.
Now, instead of making all of those somewhat lame generalizations, I can give you my true opinion: “Meh.” That’s right. “Meh.”
What exactly does “Meh.” mean though? Granted, I’ve only had Vista for a few weeks, now, but that’s long enough to see what issues I have with it. To be honest, I haven’t had as many as I expected to have. I would have loved to have been able to say, “Yeah, Vista sucks more than I possibly could have imagined,” but that’s just not true. Vista does have its weak spots though.
The first thing one might notice is that trying to use an account with limited access and keeping an admin account separate is annoying. For security purposes, it is a good idea to not constantly be logged in as an administrator, because then you aren’t able to do things that might break your computer. Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction for this too. In XP, it was so painful to do things the right way that you just made your main user an administrator. Now, with Vista, you can actually be a limited user without feeling crippled. The unfortunate side effect is the constant nagging and asking for the admin password for all sorts of tasks, which can get old pretty fast, but doesn’t happen enough to make it unusable.
This stricter control on access rights can cause some issues with programs not ready for it though. I’ve personally had trouble uninstalling a botched installation of Firefox. It will tell me to input my admin password to continue uninstallation, and then tell me that I don’t have permissions because I need to put in the administrator password.
Some other things that bother me are more cosmetic. For example, the start menu has a button that should shut down my computer, but instead the button puts it in sleep mode, which leaves my computer on. There seems to be no easy way to make this button act as I think it should though. Another thing that bothers me is that when I have two monitors plugged in, Windows can’t figure out how to put a different background on each monitor. This is a purely cosmetic matter, and won’t affect many people, but the fact that they completely overlooked this (something that’s so trivial to accomplish in the Mac universe) makes Vista seem just a tad unfinished.
There are a few other details that aren’t so much annoying as different from XP. The file structure is a tiny bit different, and many things have been moved around or changed a bit. These aren’t bad, it just takes a while to get used to.
In the end it’s not the big things, but the smaller things that make me displeased with Vista. Over all, it’s quite usable, even a bit more usable than XP, which is good, since that means they’re making progress. It’s still a Microsoft product though, and it certainly has its own flaws.
