I Hate VISTA!

There are many things that factor into user-friendliness and it absolutely floors me that something like Vista was released so many years after Apple's OS X, an operating system that has been hailed as a shining example of user friendliness. I can understand many of the shortcomings of Linux in this area...it's largely developed by geeks that like to do what they can to prevent the average user from entering the sacred halls of geekdom, and creating pain among users is a secret handshake in our meritocracy.

But when you're the dominant operating system vendor with millions of users and millions and millions of dollars in R&D, what excuse do you really have for releasing something that is actually several times more frustrating than anything a bunch of geeks have (laughingly) "designed"?

I had to work on a laptop (yes, that I previously had worked on with Vista Home Edition) that was reported as saying that it "needed to update the antivirus but need administrator to do it."

Okay, shouldn't be hard. The antivirus is one that I'm not too crazy over because it, too, has in my opinion design flaws that drive me freakin' batty as well...Central Command's Vexira. However, I take the laptop and start to work.

I ended up having the laptop brought home. I spend some time trying to get Vista to find my wireless network (usually with XP it's a simple matter of clicking the wireless icon in the tool bar and selecting from a list, but this Vista laptops wouldn't show that to me). I eventually found in the networking control panel a line in English, in tiny print, telling me I can "find a network." Fair enough.

It found my (unsecured) wireless network. Join it. Warning: EVERYONE WILL SEE WHAT YOU'RE DOING!" Then it gave a button that didn't look like a button to continue on anyway. I thought it was a label of some sort...nope, just an awkwardly labeled button in the interface. I twitched a little.

It joined my wireless network, telling me the signal strength was excellent. I then right clicked on the Vexira system tray icon and told it to update. And waited. After a few moments I noticed a blinking task bar icon; click that, it tells me that there's a system notice. Click that, and the screen does the obligatory blanking-switch-to-system-screen. Told it to update, and it belches an error with the connection.

Huh?

Told it to "return to my desktop", leading to the laptop blinking a few times.

I was disconnected from the wireless. No reason why, just not connected.

I sigh and go through all the steps to reconnect and once again bring up the update interface on the "special annoy the hell out of the user" desktop.

SAME @#% ERROR. I returned to the regular interface and check the network connection. Disconnected.

I tell the bloody thing to reconnect, and this time "remember the network" and "connect automatically".  This time the notebook connected and stayed connected.

That wasn't the end of the problems, but my gripe here is about Vista, not Vexira. I don't understand why the connection was:
A) so awkward to connect to in the first place.
B) kept disconnecting without notice.
C) had so many @#% clicks to find, establish, and re-establish.

This was on top of the issue with having to switch desktop modes a few times and having the display click and clack as it changed back and forth (resetting video modes? Redetecting the display? I don't know; from the user perspective, all I know is that it ticked me off having to repeatedly go through that annoyance).

I'm a big believer in preventing friction in a user experience. I do what I can to minimize this friction; one thing I do to make it as least annoying as possible is to secure my systems from intrusion and monitor my network usage while removing encryption from my wireless network to make it friendly to the myriad devices we use. This should have made connecting to my wireless network a simple matter of "show available networks, select, connect." So why wouldn't this @#$% notebook connect and stay connected?

Once I told it to "remember the network" and "connect automatically", it stayed connected long enough for me to get a dose of hate for Vexira. The wireless network worked without issues for my wife's Mac. My own Mac hasn't had issues. My iPod hasn't had issues. So unless something is flaky with that notebook's hardware...which hasn't been reported (although possible)...it tells me that my headaches were Vista-related.

It's almost like Vista was going out of it's way to make this three times more difficult than it needed to be! Another checkmark on why I hate Vista. Supposedly Windows 7 improves this dramatically. Me, I'm not so sure I care. There's an Apple ad that pokes fun of the "it has none of the problems Vista had...it has none of the problems XP had...it has none of the problems Windows 2000 had..." There comes a point where I just don't care anymore. When the track record goes this far down, when the experience just fails so hard and far, when I've switched to another platform altogether and found it to be a huge improvement to my ulcers...

I. Just. Don't. Care.

Pay me to try Windows 7, and I might try it. If not then I'll wait until I absolutely need to deal with a new set of headaches.