See the Vista’s and Not Much More …

… with Windows Vista

Would you believe me if I told you I DESPISE Windows Vista? Would you believe me even more if I told you I would rather pull my own head off than work with Windows Vista?  I imagine there are more than a handful of savvy computer users taken for quite the loop when Windows Vista ended up in their care.

I’m seriously gonna tar-and-feather someone from IT for making me switch to this god awful excuse for an operating system.

I’m a developer. To me, Windows XP was the ultimate platform; stable, reliable, relatively easy to recover from the dreaded ‘This program is not responding’ dilemma whenever something took more than 5 seconds to open.

Upon returning from mat leave, my computer decided that it would eat a few dozen HDD sectors, some of which were underlying some very important operating system files; The inevitable was around the corner. And after about the third time reinstalling Visual Studio because of corrupted templates, IT agreed to just ghost the machine and let me start over.

The catch? ‘The powers that be’, which tend to not always be the powers with the most technical knowledge, had decided the ENTIRE office was to move to Windows Vista.

I think I must have been on massive amounts of coffee when I agreed to be their guinea pig. After all “Toronto made the move and haven’t had any problems.” Looking back, this should have been the first red flag.

So, I drank the Vista kool-aid. It was cool and refreshing, and I saw visions of sugar plums dancing in my brain… for about ten minutes, until I realized that all the absolutely unnecessary bells and whistles completely bogged down the computer to the point of useless insanity. Honestly, were the designers on crack when they decided that an operating system that needed a monopoly on nearly an entire gigabyte of RAM was a good idea!? Is the iPod and iMac really putting that much pressure on The Company to produce something that will dazzle the senses of the corporate big-shots, or are they trying to single-handedly render the developers of the world completely comatose?

As I said before, I’m a developer. Give me Visual Studio, Firefox and a command line and I’m happy. I don’t need no fancy translucent windows or 3D window scrolling (apparently I don’t need no fancy English skills either). Once I loaded everything onto the computer that I need to develop the programming flavor of the month (Which is MOSS 2007), the computer ground to an unbelievable halt. Heck, I think my dinky little 333 MHz that I use as a file server at home ran swifter than this laptop which has now officially become a brick.

But hey! It has nifty 3-D scrolling screens and translucent menu bar thingies. So it’s a purdy brick.

Nibble my bum, Microsoft.