Executive Summary:
Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system (OS) has received a lot of hype, but it has many features that annoy users. Most Windows Vista annoyances involve software or hardware from older systems that isn't compatible with the new OS. Users also complain about Windows Vista's frequent User Account Control (UAC) messages and the OS not remembering preferences.
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You’ve heard the hype: Windows Vista is the new
desktop standard! Vista has sold 40 million copies!
Vista is Microsoft’s best desktop OS ever! But you
look around and no one in your office is using it, so you
become the official Vista guinea pig. Soon, you discover
a host of Vista annoyances to scare (or share with) your
coworkers. Here are my top 10 Vista annoyances.
10 Application incompatibility—Without a
doubt, application incompatibility is Vista’s
Achilles’ heel, particularly in upgrade scenarios.
In a business environment, Vista
was OK running applications such as Office. But my home
upgrade was a nightmare. Nero and Roxio products were
the first to throw up their hands. Many of my games were
close behind, often hamstrung with User Account Control
(UAC) messages. Most companies have updates available,
but you usually need to upgrade to the next release to get
Vista compatibility.
9 Windows Aero hardware requirements—Superficially,
the most compelling reason to migrate
from Windows XP to Vista is the Aero interface.
Unfortunately, Aero requires modern graphic
capabilities such as a minimum of 128MB of video RAM,
and it doesn’t work on most older systems that use an
integrated video adapter. Some older systems support an
add-on video graphics adapter, but many don’t.
8 Too much UAC—Although I understand the concept
behind UAC, the fact is it’s never prompted me
for anything meaningful; it simply adds more dialog
boxes to common administrative tasks. I keep it
turned on in case it ever stops something important, but you
can disable UAC in the User Accounts Control Panel applet.
7 Lost wallpapers and themes—After upgrading
to Vista, all my themes and desktop wallpapers
were replaced by new and, to me, unattractive
substitutes. And, while Microsoft was changing
everything else, why didn’t they move the power options
out of the Screen Saver tab to their own tab?
6 Losing Windows Explorer settings—On the subject
of losing things, why can’t Vista’s Windows
Explorer remember settings for different folders?
Try as I might, I can’t make it maintain the sort
order I prefer. It stays for a while, but it always returns to the
alphabetical file listing eventually.
5 Explorer drag-and-drop—Another really annoying
feature in Vista’s Windows Explorer is that it
drops files where your cursor is. When I have folders
organized by date and I drop a new file into a
folder, I want it to go to the bottom as the newest item. Vista
places it wherever in the list you release the mouse.
4 Antivirus incompatibility—Like the application
software incompatibility problem, the answer
to antivirus incompatibility is to purchase an
upgrade to a Vista-compatible release. If you
want to run the Vista x64 version, you might need to switch
products because not all antivirus vendors support the x64
edition.
3 VMware virtualization software—My copy of
VMware Workstation 5.5 has always refused to
run under Vista. Rather than buy the new version
of Workstation, I switched to VMware Server 1.03.
However, I ran into a driver problem where, for some inexplicable
reason, VMware doesn’t sign their drivers. To get
VMware Server to work on Vista, press F8 when the system
boots and select Disable Driver Signature Enforcement.
2 Dual-boot difficulties—On XP, virtualization
nearly eliminated my desire to create dual-boot
systems. But Vista’s incompatibilities with my
favorite VMware products combined with a pressing
need to test various scenarios quickly brought back the
idea of dual-booting. Unfortunately, the good old boot.ini
is gone and XP’s simple boot process has been replaced
with Vista’s nearly inscrutable Boot Configuration Data
Editor (bcdedit.exe). I’ve created several Vista dual-boot
systems, but it’s not nearly as easy as it was under XP.
1 All-in-Wonder incompatibility—
This is my biggest pet peeve with
Vista. This might be a more generic
driver incompatibility problem, but
the ATI All-in-Wonder card is where
I ran into it. ATI’s supposedly Vista-compatible
cards don’t provide video
capture support like they did under XP.
What’s worse is that this product has a “Works with
Windows Vista” logo even though it doesn’t provide
full functionality. That’s just wrong.