June 29, 2008

• Why do so many people hate Windows Vista?

  Now I’m a programmer and I’ve pretty much worked with computers all my life. Building them, fixing them, messing with software, programming for them. I’m a “tech” person by any measure. If you visit me you’ll see my place is filled with wires and hard drives and graphics cards all strewn about haphazardly. In short… I like computers.

  Except when I hate them of course.  Certain software packages just drive me to insane rage! How could anyone design their software with so little regard for the users I sometimes think? How could someone make something where so little thought was put into it?  Sometimes when I see a badly designed system I just want to fly over to Silicon valley or Redmond or wherever the developers work and punch the person who thought of it in the face!

  So I understand how people can hate a piece of software. I get it. I really do. I don’t think it’s irrational at all. You work with these programs day in and day out they become a part of your life. If they don’t work the way you want them to it’s only natural to get upset.

  But even so… I just don’t get the hate that is so regularly shewn about the Windows Vista operation system. 

  Now I’m no Microsoft Fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but this attitude it’s just really strange to me. But I go to forums and people talk about how much they dislike it. I hear people say how they absolutely *have* to downgrade their new systems to Windows XP because “Vista sucks”.  And there are all kinds of websites out there showing step by step instructions for how to do this. I’ve even heard some system manufacturers now add an option to buy a system with windows XP installed rather than Windows Vista. And they charge you for it too! As if Windows XP were more valuable than Windows Vista.  It’s crazy.

  I do understand that Windows Vista has significantly higher system prerequisites than XP. But that doesn’t explain the depth of people’s hatred. I’ve used Vista. I have two machines that run Vista at home and I run Vista at work. And I can tell you honestly I don’t notice the difference. Granted I’m running 2GB RAM on two systems and 3 GB RAM on the other, but even when my laptop only had 1 GB of RAM when I first bought it sure I noticed that it was a little bit slower than XP would be, but not incredibly so. The laptop still worked fine for everything I needed it to do.

  User interface-wise sure I see lots of little things I’d change that I don’t like. And sure maybe it isn’t as good as a Mac (I’ve barely ever used a Mac so I wouldn’t know).  And sure there are lots of thigns I like in KDE and Gnome better than Vista (it’s a trade off, there are things I prefer about Vista too).  But you can’t honestly tell me you think the Vista UI is strictly worse than Windows XP! Windows XP’s UI is almost identical except without a lot of cool features that Vista added. Vista also organized and cleaned up things. Everything is easier to find, better labeled, and more comprehensible for the layman. Navigating in explorer is easier all around and I love the new address bar. Some of the features I just don’t use and don’t see much of a point to, like the new side bar and the weird new 3D switch between windows thing, but I just turn those off and don’t use them. No problem.

  And security-wise is where I say Vista is great. The nag boxes that everyone rags on I think are absolutely amazingly useful. Windows desperately needed something like that since in the past it was so trivial for programs to be running, manipulating systems settings, deleting files, doing whatever the heck they felt like without you even knowing it! Now you are basically running in something much akin to a lua and then sudo when you need an application to update system settings. That’s just like every other OS has been doing since the beginning of time. And it’s the way it has to be in order for you to be secure.  Not only that but the design of these dialogs that show you when system settings are being altered are much more elegant and easier to use in my opinion than the alternative of running some excessive bloatware firewall that nags you perpetually whenever anything on your system does anything.  And overall I bet the memory difference between Vista and XP is not nearly as bad people think when you take into account the memory used by these massive security packages people run, and *need* to run on XP.

  Now most of the most horribly infected machines I’ve encountered have been running Windows XP. So far, I haven’t really run into any Vista machine with significant malware on it. It’s true Vista hasn’t caught on as much yet but I think it also has to do with Vista being a more secure design than XP altogether.

  All of this is not to say that I think Vista is great by any means. I’m just saying I think it really IS a step up from XP. Not as much of a step up as XP was from the unspeakable OSes that came before, but a step up nonetheless. I wouldn’t go out of my way to upgrade to Vista. In fact if a machine isn’t running Vista out of the box there’s pretty much no way I’d spend one dime on upgrading to Vista unless for some reason I had to. But if a machine comes with Vista preinstalled, I don’t understand spending all the time and effort to downgrade to XP. And I really can’t get paying *more* so that you can have XP. What’s so great about XP? I’ve been spending years waiting to get *rid* of XP and move on to something better. Why would anyone want to go *back* to it. Ugh. It’s insane!

  And what really really bothers me is the people who will go through all this trouble to downgrade to XP but then would never even consider installing Linux on their box! I mean come on! If you’re going to go mess with your OS anyway, why not just ditch MS altogether? If you really need XP or Vista for games, run it in a virtual machine or something. I just find myself unable to comprehend this.

  The only explanation that makes sense is if you buy a new system that just sucks and yet they put Vista on it anyway. One that has way too little RAM and an ass video card and a poor processor. Hopefully most manufacturers aren’t dumb enough to do that anymore. The only thing I’ve seen still happening lately is a number of manufacturers still putting too little RAM in their machines. But luckily DDR2 is dirt cheap these days so that’s still no excuse to me to downgrade your system. Installing more RAM is easier than downgrading your OS!

  Anyway, that’s just a random rant I had to get off my chest. 

  Are you one of those who hates Windows Vista?  Maybe you can explain it to me?

  • 6:57 pm
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