Archived entry | Matt Wilcox .net

I've nearly had it with Vista!

My latest Vista bug (a sudden inability to select multiple files in Windows Explorer) has nearly pushed me over the edge. I’ve had enough, the operating system is a complete pain in the rear-end, it’s got bugs galore, and it does nothing, absolutely nothing, better than WinXP. Oh it has little ‘niceties’, but there is no compelling reason to use it over XP that I’ve found. Those niceties are frankly not worth the pain. Nor having to suffer through the DRM that’s built-in. My problems with three months use of Vista:

• Inability to select multiple files in Windows Explorer, or to use Ctrl+A (limited, for the moment, to one (often used) folder). Here’s a potential fix for anyone else having the same issue, but it did not work for me. The weird thing is that to re-gain functionality I just need to rename the folder. But, now, any time I create a folder with the same name - I lose multi-select.
• Random crashes of Windows Explorer (that’s windows explorer, not IE) about three times per day after installing Visual Studio and the other ‘mission critical’ development applications.
• Vista loses its Gateway Address (and usually therefore its net connection) after going into sleep or hibernate - I need to reboot to establish an internet connection again (it will connect to the local network just fine).
• Clicking on any mailto: link in any application when Outlook isn’t the default mail client means sitting back to watch a never ending number of IE’s spawn. Same when right clicking any link and going to ’send to…’
• Connect a monitor that’s physically on the left of the primary, Vista always forgets the settings, puts it on the right and gets the resolution wrong.
• Recover from sleep and watch all the sidebar widgets get re-arranged (a petty fault, but annoying)
• Put up with the constant interruptions from the User Account Control system, spend 15min wondering why a program isn’t working only to later figure out it needs administrator privileges thanks to UAC, or disable it completely and be annoyed by the warning flag that appears every time you boot up
• Watch as random programs (DivX player codec for example) de-activate the entire Aero interface when they load
• Never be sure what the ‘power’ button will do, thanks to the (count them) 7 different actions that can be automatically assigned to it depending on the power state my laptop is running in.
• Virtual PCs with networking are ridiculously hard to use in Vista because you need unique MAC addresses, and so you need to install a loop-back adapter, which is in no way easy to configure. We need VM’s for our cross-platform testing, so this is a big issue for us at work.
• And finally a complaint from Joel: IIS7 is ‘an awkward honk of s*** that doesn’t support half the stuff it needs out of the box’

I recently tried to get Ubuntu 7.10 Herd 5 running, but it didn’t want to boot on my laptop. I hope the final version works - because if it does I’ll be formatting my drive and going dual-boot (recovering 10Gb of hidden ‘backup partition’ in the process, thanks but no-thanks Samsung!)

Entry Information

Posted:

Fri, 28th Sep 2007 at 18:09 UTC

Filed under:

• My Two Cents

Tags:

• rant