The Abomination that is Windows Vista

I recently had cause to work on a system that another department had ordered a few years ago with Windows Vista Home Basic on it.

It reminded me all over again of all the things I hate so passionately about Windows Vista.

I recently blogged about my trials and tribulations involving the fact that there's no default administrator account while I had to reset the password for the default administrative user on the system in question. It was irritating, but followed the trend of other operating systems; "hide the administrative user behind another layer so people who don't think before hitting Enter will have another hurdle to cross before destroying their system."

The more I worked with this computer, though, the more agitated I became. The computer wasn't really a slouch. It was a core 2 duo with a gig of RAM. Yet I booted it, it would pop up with a welcome screen. Log in. Goes black. Comes back up. Flickers back out. Comes back up. I think at a couple points in the troubleshooting I turned off the computer accidentally, thinking that it had crashed when it went black for more than ten seconds.

My first computer ran DOS and Windows 3.1 on a 486SX-25 processor and 4 meg of RAM. That system even ran a beta of Windows 95. 4 meg of RAM. The is like comparing an 86' Chevy to the starship Enterprise. And Vista was killing it.

I had to reboot it several times over the course of upgrades. The upgrade mechanism was infuriating. There was very little feedback; it would sit at the prompt that it was checking for upgrades at 0% for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. When I thought it had crashed, it suddenly jumped to 40% complete.

Other times it would come up and say I had 4 optional addons (after several rounds of updates completed). Done? Nope. I clicked "check for updates" (again) and it suddenly found another couple of updates waiting.

I was even more agitated earlier when it installed a whole group of updates...twenty or thirty...then I attempted to install Internet Explorer 8. It wouldn't. The install program would just "disappear", no warning, no nothing. I downloaded it four or five times.

I broke down and downloaded the standalone installer to another folder and ran it from there. It failed, this time leaving a link on the desktop with a potential fix. Between that and checking my trusty friend Google, I was told to check Windows Updates first. Then there was a little note saying that Vista with SP1 didn't need this, and IE8 would install fine with Service Pack 1 installed.

No...service...pack...one?

I went to Microsoft's site and downloaded a FOUR HUNDRED MEGABYTE service pack. And installed it.

Then installed IE 8.

You can rightly assume there were three or four reboots involved.

And I nearly screamed when it said there was another 200 megabytes of updates waiting for me after those were installed.

I had to attempt to install those updates about four times. Each time, some installed, others failed due to some vague error. A reboot and retry would yield a little more progress.

You can rightly assume that I was getting more and more agitated at this.

After all these updates, Windows Updates decided that there was a service pack 2 waiting for me.

If you didn't know, most service packs roll previous fixes right in. So if you install service pack 2, you already have all the fixes that came before it. That way you don't have to install service pack 1then 2. You install 2 and get all the fixes since the operating system was released up to that point.

I was incensed and furious. What kind of braindead monkey designed this update system?

All this time I was working on getting the antivirus working. In the corporation we use Vexira antivirus from Command Central. It's not my favorite.

Vista doesn't seem to love it either. I right click on the tray icon and tell it to update itself. The update console doesn't come up. Instead some "interactive service dialog" pops up. Click it, and it takes me to some kind of privileged desktop that hides the things I was actually working on so I can see the antivirus update console.

With a heavy sigh I told it to start updating. It dutifully began downloading a new version of the antivirus. The computer sat for about a minute.

And went dark.

Another "flicker out"? WTF?

I moved the mouse and the login screen pops up. It said my administrative user was "already logged in", but...huh?

I couldn't find any way to shut that off. Unless I keep moving the mouse while in that "interactive desktop", the @#% thing would drop me to the login prompt after a minute or two.

This didn't happen at the regular desktop. Couldn't find a setting to stop this from happening in power settings or desktop settings or the user account.

I would have checked the local user policies, but because of Microsoft's crappy ranking system of their operating systems they don't include the policy editor with their home edition of Vista. Same operating system as their "business" operating system, but artificially crippled by cutting out utilities that could actually help the users in need of troubleshooting...another reason I moved to Linux in the first place. If your system couldn't act as a server it's because the hardware or software couldn't handle it, not because of someone's idea of a fair market or sales policy found posted in their colon or some other artificial limitation in the software.

Supposedly Windows 7 fixes a lot of the usability snafus and glitches. I hear lots of praises for it. The problem is, I don't care. I've had enough frustrations with Windows. I've spent years finding workarounds to various glitches in Windows 2000, then XP, and now I'm expected to leap again with Windows 7.

I'll do it because eventually I'll have to. But I can't enjoy it anymore. I used to be enamored by technology; I loved jumping into the theory behind multitasking operating systems and handles and filesystems. I used to devour articles in Byte magazine that compared various operating systems and how they worked and compared to each other in architecture. I think I still have magazines in storage that had information on the great OS/2 vs. NT debates.

But today it's no longer a question that interests me. The arguments don't focus on usability or architecture so much as how much the OS can be dumbed down for users; the Vista control panel tries to communicate in plain English concepts that for tech people would be much better served with straightforward checkboxes and text boxes for values. I don't need handholding and friendly web-like links asking if I'd like to change my password, thank you.

There aren't any companies really trying to innovate in operating systems. There are three; Apple's OS X, Microsoft's Windows, and Linux. That's it.

There is a convergence in features and eye candy that suck up resources like crazy. I remember my old computer was perfectly adequate for my tasks. Today you couldn't even get a common OS distribution to boot on a system with those specs.

I've played with BeOS, AmigaOS, Linux, MacOS, OS X, DOS (MS, IBM, Novell), Windows from 3.0 to 98 (we don't speak of ME), NT from 3.1 to Vista, Netware, and several small and hobby OS's like QNX and ReactOS and others too small to name here. Today most of the projects are gone. Except, of course, for Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Vista was a reminder of what I hated about this trend. Technology is exciting today with new devices; the Kindle. The Nook. The iPod and iPhone. The web. Operating systems are so bland and commodity that they're not really even worth looking at anymore.

When operating systems frustrated me before it was because of my own limitations and lack of knowledge. I had to expand my understanding of how the system worked in order to bend it to my will. Today the frustration is being designed into the operating system. "Are you sure you want to run this?" "Do you really want this program to run?"

Or all the times I'm searching for a function that disappeared from the previous version of Windows. It's infuriating when I know what I'm looking to do and can't because I have to interpret the "natural language" version of the interface.

Or I have to click to open the C: drive, then confirm that yes I want to see this files, then click on Program Files, and again confirm that I wanted to see the contents of the folder.

At that point I really can't help but re-examine my job duties. It's one thing when I can't get something to work because I'm lacking information. Learn more about LDAP. Learn more about TCP/IP. Learn about priorities and file handles and applications to monitor I/O. Read read read. But to have an operating system act like it knows more than I do, and actively get into my way when I'm trying to configure it or set something up?

I'm tired of it.

And now Microsoft is promising, just as they did with Vista, that Windows 7 is better than anything they've released before.

Yeah, right. I'm going to go back to my corner and browse the web with my iPod.