The box arrived from FedEx, so I’m sending out the $2800 paperweight today. And if that wasn’t enough to aggravate me about the new technology platforms, now comes the news that Vista Service Pack 1 won’t drop until 2008, instead of this fall, as was originally promised. It seems that someone at Microsoft has finally publicly acknowledged what every sane person who has come into contact with Vista already knows: it’s spaghetti code, and it needs to be fixed.
However, the company seems to be rolling out the fixes not so much as a way to make the operating system usable, but as a means of coaxing businesses into blowing their wad on upgrading:
By talking about SP1, Microsoft hopes to sway some businesses that have
yet to move forward in any fashion to start at least testing the OS.
Uh-huh.
Here’s the deal: XP is working just fine for most businesses, who are inherently risk-averse. The prospect of having to junk all their hardware ($$$$!!!) just so they can adopt a shitty OS whose main improvement is … what, exactly? I’ve been wrestling with Vista for the last six months, and I still can’t figure out what it’s supposed to do that XP doesn’t, other than run that little “Aero” thing, which I never use anyway. Mostly, Vista just takes up more space, requires more memory to run, bugs the shit out of me every time I try to run an application, and prevents me from using multimedia programs. Not to mention that it hates external devices and peripherals and tries to wipe and reformat my iPod every damn time I plug the thing in.
This is supposed to be an incentive to upgrade?
Even the rah-rah cheerleaders who genuflect before anything that Microsoft does (what? like the clowns at PC Magazine don’t know which side of the silicon chip the butter’s on?), have started to openly slam the non-functionality of Vista:
I’ve configured every PC on my home network to share drives and
printers, yet owing to some undiscovered element, there’s no guarantee
that any of them will be visible at any given time.
Take my media center PC, for example. It’s supposed to serve up
photos, videos, and music. Instead, it often simply drops off the
network for absolutely no reason. Chip Van Winkle might be able to see
it, but Compuccino can’t.Another complaint: With XP, wireless network connectivity out of
sleep mode was virtually instantaneous. Now it can take up to 30
seconds to reconnect, even when my systems do wake up. That’s in a
trusted network, a trusted zone, and a trusted system. And why does it
take so long for the dialog box to pop up after I right-click on the
network tray icon?Vista has replaced XP’s quick reaction time with
molasses. I’m always wondering if something’s wrong.I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up
rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more.But I
won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine
months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too
much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the
kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t
get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to
Linux.
I gotta say, Vista is making it aggravating enough for me to think about doing the same damn thing.
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