The More I Use Vista the More I Dislike It

I was about to sit down to write a post about all the things that bug me about Windows Vista... but Steve Wiseman beat me to it. His "Five Sins of Vista" is essential reading... but I'm going to add my commentary to his penance.

My biggest complaint with Vista is Steve's #3: Windows Networking is a mess. Mess is putting it lightly, and while Wiseman points out that the Windows "Network and Sharing Center" is one of the OS's most confusing features, he didn't mention the nightmare that is attempting to network a Vista computer to a network containing XP or Windows 2000 PCs. Frankly, I've been trying to figure this out for a week and still can't get what ought to be a simple printer share working.

Wiseman's #4 involves Windows Search, which is a complete joke. Remember how Vista was supposed to take those cool desktop search apps like Yahoo! Desktop and Google Desktop and integrate them seamlessly into the OS. Well, guess what, searching is faster with Vista... but you can't search inside a file using Vista's so-called "advanced" search system (which comes up when you hit F3). Oddly, the search system integrated into the Start Menu appears to be completely different and works much better, at least for data files. You can't easily search for system files and non-document files with it.

My other big agreement with Wiseman is his #1 complaint about the file browsing system. Windows is trying to move away from the C:\folder\folder\folder... heirarchy, I suppose because less savvy users were confused by it. I find the Vista method much more confusing, mainly because you have to end up delving into that directory structure frequently in order to get anything but very basic file operations done. Wiseman has other complaints about the way it works (and fails to work), too.

I've found other nagging problems in Vista—like help files that were obviously imported from Windows XP and never updated with Vista's changes—and I'm sure I'll be complaining about them on this blog in the weeks that come. Hopefully those complaints will be followed by thoughtful explanations on how to fix those problems... but for the issues listed above, there's not much you can do aside from learning to live with it.