Linked by David Adams on Wed 23rd Apr 2008 16:31 UTC, submitted by CIozzio
Windows Everyone's been talking for what feels like an eternity about Vista being a major blunder, and everyone has their theories as to why it happened. So why would John C. Dvorak be any different? He's got 11 reasons why the OS was destined to flop.
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My Vista experience
by miscz on Wed 23rd Apr 2008 18:06 UTC
miscz
Member since:
2005-07-17

I have tried Vista just after it was released with pirated copy of Ultimate. It was very slow to install and work, even with all the drivers. I gave up fast - my Athlon64 3500+ with 1GB of RAM seemed to be to slow and I was quite content with all the modern features provided by Ubuntu.

I have tried installing Vista yesterday again (this time on Athlon64 X2 5000+ @3GHz with 2GB of RAM, reasonably powerful computer IMHO) as I support my relatives and friends computers often and some of them are moving to Vista since SP1 was released.

"Tried" is a key word here. I have prepared empty NTFS/HPFS active primary partition on my hard drive for Vista but it kept saying that it couldn't find a partition that could be used for install, I have recreated it and formatted from Vista partitioning utility but it didn't help. I figured that it might not like other operating systems sitting there given the previous Microsoft OS record.

So I've got my old empty ATA HDD from my "ancient hardware" and useless wires drawer ;) This time it went little further but crapped out just few seconds later with error saying that it couldn't find vaild system volume. On a drive that it just formatted and had all for itself.

I gave up on this as Google didn't bring much useful help. I've installed XP SP2 and "upgraded" it to Vista - it worked although took quite some time.

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Now for the Vista. What a mess it is. Core desktop OS utilities are IMO terrible. Windows Explorer tries hard to bring some useful features from Finder/Nautilus and I for one find them useful (favourite places sidebar, breadcrumb address bar). Other than that it's interface is too busy and many "features" are purely for cosmetics and not usability, often having the opposite effect on both sides.

Control Panel is even worse, there are recursive links everywhere and it lacks any impression of being sanely structured. Thank $deity for classic view but they have managed to bork it a little too.

Aero - very good looking, maybe they went over the top with the glass effect but overall it's elegant. They should have shortened the animation time though because little delays everywhere are very distracting.

UAC - I have disabled it as soon as I've found those settings in Control Panel (by accident).

Sidebar - useless waste of space and resources, why is it enabled by default?

I'm still trying to use Vista and I'll probably leave it on a small partition because I have to know how to use it, but it's not a very pleasant experience. There are many new useful features (and insanely good looking Minesweeper ;) ) but problems I have brought in this comment are mostly showstoppers for me.

2007/2008 is certainly not a year of Windows desktop.

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So, I'll add some points to the Mr. Dvorak list ;)

12. Bad design decisions.
13. Too hard to use / broken.