Vista Impressions

Prologue

For the record, I installed Vista for the first time on March 02, 2007, as described elsewhere. Since then I have done everything I can to make it my workhorse operating system. I've used it for basic home management stuff, email, Internet surfing, writing in my journal, creating web sites (including parts of this one), writing code, playing games, and even some of my audio and video tasks. The point of this essay is to evaluate whether Vista is really ready for prime time or not.

Suitability Assessment

General Work

I'll start by saying Vista is good enough for most general work people will want to do with it. I qualify that with 'most' because it seems to me that Vista is pretty bad at backward compatibility in some respects. For the most part, though, it will serve as well or better than Windows XP did.

Handling email, web browsing, and similar net-centric tasks are all pretty much what they were in XP, but with the added bonus of built-in support for RSS feed handling and some other niceties. I wasn't exactly wow-ed by the RSS gadget, largely because I've grown far too accustomed to using SharpReader, but I could see how it would be good enough for a fair number of users.

Perhaps it's because of the graphics changes in the operating system (OS), but it seems to me like web pages render without so much flashing under Vista as they do under XP. That could be a browser thing, a network thing, or most likely (I suspect) a graphics thing. Whatever the case, Vista makes web browsing a bit slicker than it was in XP, and that will be especially true for those who weren't already using Microsoft's ClearType technology.

The bulk of the software I use for general, day-to-day tasks works just fine, though I did run into certain installation issues. The one glaring exception I've found to date is with Intuit's Quicken 2005. Like a lot of people, I use Quicken to manage my finances. In fact, as I think about it, I have been using Quicken since 1991. I bought it originally because I had started my own company and needed something to help me manage the books, so I'm a long time user.

But I think that's going to have to change. Quicken has always been a poor Windows citizen, insofar as it's one of the few applications that doesn't work well over a remote connection, has repainting issues, and so forth. I don't know why, but it really hasn't improved much in those respects over the years. With Vista, though, all hell breaks loose. I couldn't get it to install without jumping through all kinds of hoops, and then when I did get it installed, its auto-updater kept breaking. And when I finally got past all that nonsense, the product itself crashed completely every time on startup.

Yes, I realize Quicken 2005 is out of date, but I still use utilities I wrote for Windows 3.1 over a decade ago, and those work just fine under Vista. It's utterly pathetic that software from a major vendor fares so badly. Those of you who are using Quicken for your finances should probably hold off until Intuit gets its act together, or do what I'm doing: give Microsoft Money another look. I figure if any personal finance software should work with Vista, Microsoft's certainly should. As long as it imports all my old Quicken data, I guess I'm open to a change.

Final Verdict: Good Enough

Software Development

I've also been using my Vista system to do software development, specifically a couple of web sites and a contract I recently picked up to write software that processes Office 2007 documents in Open XML format. Both of those projects are targeted for the .NET 2.x platform using Visual Studio 2005 with all patches applied. Other development tools include Macromedia Studio 8 (i.e., Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, etc.), ReSharper, Subversion and its TortoiseSVN client, SlickEdit, SQL Server 2005, and virtually all the tools by Red Gate Software.

Oddly enough, the only development tool with which I've had any substantive issues is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It crashes back to the desktop from time to time, gripes about wanting to be run with administrative privileges every time it's launched (though I can disable the warning if I wish), and glitches in various ways every now and then with its screen repainting, highlighting, and other features. It hasn't done anything pathological, but it's a bit disappointing that the worst apple in the barrel is from Microsoft.

In addition to the basics, I use a whole bunch of utilities too numerous to list when working on software. I've got software that helps me with project planning/management, scripting in languages like AWK, Perl, Python, and so forth. I'm happy to say that Vista is a welcome development environment on the whole. It's not quite as smooth as XP sometimes, and yes I'll say more about that too, but it seems like a pretty solid development platform.

The one thing I haven't had much of a chance to do yet is develop explicitly for the .NET 3.x platform. I downloaded all the components to do development with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), using Microsoft's Expression/Blend XAML tools, and I'm pretty interested to mess around with the new stuff in the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) as well. I just haven't had the time to get all that stuff installed and working—project deadlines and all that, you know.

I believe I have an ideal project at my day job to test out the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) using XOML and the latest version of the SharePoint services, but it just isn't a priority right now. Perhaps once I nail down the last issues with our near-real time GPS/load tracking software, I can get around to it. Suffice it to say, though, that Vista is at least as capable a development platform as XP, and I'm sure it will get a lot better once a few vendors fix their tools.

Final Verdict: More Than Good Enough

Gaming

Let's start with Microsoft's premise, that Vista is the gamer's OS. It's supposed to make our games prettier, courtesy of DirectX 10 (DX10). It's supposed to make them run faster, thanks to DX10 and the improvements under the hood. And it's supposed to make them easier to manage, thanks to all the new UI stuff. In short, Vista is supposed to kick XP's digital behind when it comes to gaming. That's what the whole Games for Windows initiative is all about; making Vista the preeminent gaming platform.

Broken Video

The reality is very different; in fact, it's painful. I say that for three major reasons and a few minor reasons. The first of the major reasons is video support. Plenty of serious gamers enjoy dual video cards, but any of them who own NVIDIA graphics cards are simply out of luck. From what I've read, ATI's latest official drivers allegedly support their Crossfire technology under Vista, but I've heard of enough problems therewith to think that ATI owners aren't much better off right now.

To be fair this is a driver issue, so it's not really Microsoft's fault; they're not responsible for making sure every vendor has good drivers. But let's not kid ourselves either: it's not like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and ATI didn't have years to work together. Frankly, I think it's inexcusable to portray Vista as the gamer's OS when it's lacking such basic driver support from the two largest video card vendors! I fully understand a few bugs here and there, but the vendors in question have had years to get the job done, and major features aren't functional at all in their current offerings.

Incidentally, for NVIDIA users, limited SLI support is available via beta drivers available at nZone, but they're hardly a panacea. Since installing the 101.41 drivers, I have seen a big performance improvement but only at the cost of compatibility. A few of the games I've tried have been made playable under Vista by the limited SLI support, but most of them crash from time to time in ways they don't at all under XP. In fact, one of the games was able to crash Vista completely, despite Microsoft's supposedly moving the graphics stuff into the "safety" of user-mode.

Broken Audio

The second major issue is audio. Vista breaks existing game audio badly and obviously. I don't know what the fools in Redmond were thinking, but Creative Labs' EAX technology—merely the de facto standard for gaming audio—is unsupported under Vista! As it turns out, there is unsupported, beta technology available—the Creative ALchemy Project—to work around for this egregious bit of Microsoftian stupidity but only at the cost of routing "old" DirectSound calls through a translation layer into OpenAL.

It goes without saying that any translation layer brings yet another performance hit, assuming it works at all. As with so many other things in Vista, I haven't been able to get it working properly. I should admit that I haven't spent much time trying yet, and I've read some good things from users on the forum, so I keep hoping I'll be able to get it going without too much more trouble. Until then, there's nothing more I can say about it except that I hope it fills the void.

Creative Labs has been pretty up front about this for a while (this highly illuminating post in their forums dates back to September of last year), but that hardly gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I didn't lay out all that cash for a high-end audio card so that Microsoft could abandon support for, oh, every game in existence. Again, isn't it kind of difficult to understand how Microsoft can promote Vista as the gaming OS when it screws up so much with so many games? IQs must drop precipitously inside the borders of the Microsoft campus.

I know what you're thinking: "This is ridiculous, Phil, even Microsoft isn't stupid enough to break the audio in virtually every game ever written for Windows?!" It is nearly impossible to believe, but I assure you it's true. The following highlights the differences in the "Sound Devices" section of the output from DxDiag as run under both Vista and XP. The key attributes, hardware acceleration level and EAX support, have been highlighted. As you can see, XP supports full acceleration whereas Vista supports basic acceleration, and when it comes to EAX support only XP has it.

The result is immediately obvious to anyone with ears. When I'm playing a first-person shooter game under XP, I not only hear the sound of the bullet, I hear it whizzing past me with proper occlusion, reverb, doppler shift, and position in the stereo field. Under Vista I hear the sound of the bullet. I can't tell where it came from, and it sounds the same when fired outdoors as in a huge auditorium. In terms of gaming audio, Vista sucks. Period.

Slower Performance

Moving on, my third major reason is the overall hit in performance. As for hard data, I won't even bother reporting the numbers with the latest official NVIDIA drivers. They're just not an option. In every case, I saw performance drop to 55% - 60% of what I enjoy under XP, presumably due to the lack of SLI support. I like to run my games at my monitor's native resolution, 1600 x 1200, and without SLI that's just not possible with some of the games in question (e.g., Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Rainbow 6 Vegas, etc.). The following are the most basic benchmarks I use, which provide the only hard numbers I think I can trust:

In the above chart, I am providing both the CPU clock and multiplier numbers as well as the GPU core and memory clock rates for sake of completeness. I was able to achieve a small 7 MHz. boost to the front-side bus (FSB) for an overall win of another 77 MHz overclock. That's not much, but Vista gaming seems far more finicky in that respect than XP. I didn't even bother trying to overclock the video cards, largely because they're already pumping out serious heat.

The number I find most interesting is the 16% drop in CPU performance detected by the Aquamark benchmark, which matches informal observations in games known to be CPU limited. Vista does seem to run more smoothly than XP, but I fear the search indexing and all that other whiz-bang stuff is eating the CPU, and that's the last thing a gamer needs. I haven't yet started trying to prune services, turn off indexing, and otherwise free up more of my CPU, but that's where I'm headed next.

Some of my friends specifically requested benchmarks on particular games, and I truly intended to provide them. But what I've found is that there are very few games that seem to have a reliable approach to benchmarking. I recorded my own demos and played them back in a couple of games, but I found enough variability to make me question whether the approach was worthwhile. As such, I'm going to settle (for now) with subjective observations backed up by quasi-fictitious numbers.

In other words, when I've used benchmarking in games that supply it explicitly (e.g., Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, etc.), I have found a clear drop in performance of between 10% - 20%. This drop is as reliable and repeatable as it is quantifiable. And because that seems to match the Aquamark numbers, of particular relevance here because of the CPU loads created by said games, and because it seems to match even less formal benchmarks under other games such as Rainbow 6 Vegas, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Titan Quest, I feel confident in reporting that Vista is going to cost you roughly that much performance.

The net result of this performance loss is game dependent. I don't even notice it when playing World of Warcraft because that game just isn't taxing to my system, but it's noticeable with several games and makes the difference between being playable and unplayable for a few. Yes, I could turn down the resolution in some cases and get better framerates, but I made the jump to LCD monitors and bought beefy hardware precisely because I don't want to do that. Here is the comparison data between Vista and XP; when the latter outperforms the former on the same hardware that's a Vista failure in my mind. As you can see, there are far too many failures.

I realize these terms are a bit subjective, but I'll attempt to give them a more precise meaning. To me, a game plays perfectly if I can crank up all the goodies, enable some image quality (IQ) enhancements (anisotropic filtering and/or anti-aliasing as needed), and still get great game play. A game is merely playable if I have to make some sacrifices to achieve a smooth frame rate the majority of the time. A game is simply unplayable to me if it's always jerky, even in low-demand situations.

As you can see, the Vista performance hit obliterates my ability to enjoy Oblivion, Rainbow 6 Vegas, and Supreme Commander, which just happen to be the games I was playing most before accepting the software development contract that has been eating my free time. Suffice it to say that Vista is not the right gaming platform today and won't be until the hardware or drivers catch up. Perhaps NVIDIA can wrangle better performance out of their drivers, but as the numbers suggest I think the problem is more Vista's CPU use. Were I building a new system today, I wouldn't settle for anything less than a quad-core CPU. Vista needs it.

Minor Reasons

The minor reasons why Vista isn't a gamer's OS right now are varied, so I'll mention only the one that I find most irksome: Microsoft's inexcusably stupid memory handling. I mentioned in my previous article that Vista sees only 2.5 GB of the 4.0 GB in my system. While that may not seem so frustrating—2.5 GB is still a lot of memory these days, after all—it's more pernicious than it first appears because of the memory "footprint" difference between Vista and XP.

When I'm booted into my gaming installation of XP SP2, it reports a total memory of 2,558 MB, out of which roughly 2,132+ MB is typically available. A quick calculation reveals the XP memory footprint to be around 426 MB. In contrast, Vista shows a total memory of 2,557 MB, of which roughly 1,471 MB is available. This gives Vista a memory footprint of 1086 MB, more than two and a half times that of XP. And to be clear, my XP installation has many tasks loading at startup, whereas my Vista installation is pretty clean; the Vista comparison will only grow worse as more software is installed.

So why is that significant? Because Vista inherits XP's impossibly stupid memory handling, and because Vista itself gobbles up a third of a gigabyte more than XP, your games will have a lot less memory to use under Vista than under XP. To put this in very concrete terms, when Battlefield 2 (BF2) was released lots of gamers found out pretty quickly that it ran a whole lot better on systems with 2 GB than on systems with 1 GB. The "sweet spot", so to speak, seems to be around 1.5 GB of free RAM for BF2. If that's correct, then even the current generation of games are already bumping into the memory limits in Vista!

And it's not like things are going to get any better. When have you ever seen the next generation of games require less memory? Games coming out this year might work well enough, but by the Christmas season of this year we'll surely be seeing titles that really need 2 GB or more of free memory; you're just not going to have that under Vista, not unless Microsoft stops lopping off the top gigabyte. Me, I'm going to stick with XP—it leaves up to 3.3 GB available for games if I'm willing to stick with SP1—until the dolts in Redmond use some of that war-chest cash to buy a clue.

Yes, for those in the know, I am aware that such memory limitations vanish altogether if I install the 64 bit version of Vista, but given the near complete lack of drivers for hardware—if you think it's hard to get quality 32-bit drivers, just try finding quality 64-bit drivers—that's just not an option. Besides, all of the 64-bit gaming previews I've read demonstrate a clear slowdown running today's 32-bit games under 64-bit XP/Vista, so it's not like moving to the 64-bit world is going to make things any better, not until the drivers and developers catch up.

Summary

So let's recap. Microsoft says that Vista is the gaming OS of choice. Roughly six years after delivering XP, and God alone knows how many gajillion lines of code, Vista breaks high end graphics rather badly, abandons support for the dominant game audio standard completely, and adds a significant performance penalty to boot. One wonders: precisely which of these "improvements" makes Vista the gaming OS of choice? GGs, Microsoft!

Final Verdict: Mostly Useless

Media (i.e., Audio/Visual) Stuff

I have quite an investment in pro-audio tools for my computer. I've got a great I/O board and a lot of great software. The sad fact, though, is that I can make use of none of it, all because of driver issues. I can't get the XP drivers working for my hardware, and Vista drivers aren't available, so I'm essentially screwed by Vista. Frankly, I'm somewhat relieved to discover it too, insofar as the drivers for my I/O board would be the easiest to come by. I can't even imagine trying to get Vista drivers for the idiotic copy-protection dongles used by some of my software (e.g., Cubase). Hands down, Vista is outright hostile to musicians.

The situation improves somewhat with respect to video production, or at least it's supposed to. I wouldn't know; my video editing software (Pinnacle) doesn't work under Vista, though Pinnacle Systems has pledged a patch to support it. I can connect up my DV Cam, and I can make use of it with Windows Movie Maker, but frankly that thing is a toy compared to Pinnacle Studio. As with so many other tasks, I'll stick with XP for the foreseeable future.

I'm sad to say I've also experienced lots of playback issues, none of which occur under XP. I'm a Rhapsody subscriber, and although the Rhapsody software doesn't work at all under Vista—noticing a common theme yet?—their web-based player functions pretty well. But whereas playback under XP is rock solid, playback under Vista suffers from occasional dropouts and stalls. I see the same behavior when playing back MP3 files on my local hard disk using Winamp, arguably the world's smoothest and easiest-on-the-hardware player, so I don't think the issues are strictly network related. I haven't found a repeatable set of steps to produce the problem, but it happens often enough to be annoying.

And that's just the audio. Hands down, Vista is terrible at video compared to XP. DivX and Xvid files play beautifully under XP, but many of them either don't work at all under Vista, exhibit freaky synchronization issues, or just crash Windows Media Player outright. Most DVDs seem to play reasonably well, though I can't claim to understand why the video can sometimes bog down and become so jerky. The opening video on my Underworld Evolution DVD, for example, stutters badly, though the movie itself plays well—and does so, I should add, with the basic DVD software that ships with Vista (unlike XP, which required an add-on decoder).

Oh, and I have to indulge in one tinfoil-hat-ism: is it any wonder that of all the common codecs I tried, Apple's QuickTime is the very worst? Assuming you can get it to install properly, try watching the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer trailer in HD. If it doesn't crash outright, it won't work properly beyond the first few seconds. I can't help but wonder whether the 'softies indulged in a wee bit of anti-competitive behavior, deliberately targeting Apple's codec. If not, it's quite a coincidence.

The one bright spot I have found thus far is that CD/DVD burning seems more solid under Vista than in XP. I gave up rather quickly on XP's built in tools, preferring Nero and other such utilities for their features and reliability. Since none of those tools work yet under Vista—or even install correctly in my attempts—I used the built-in burning features to make a few audio CDs and back up some big files to a data DVD. The tools are very light on features, particularly compared to Nero, but they work well, smoothly, and quickly. Frankly, I was impressed that Microsoft has managed to build such functional burning into Vista; it's a nice step forward in that respect.

The bottom line is pretty simple: if you're an audio-visual professional, you have no business even considering Vista. It may be all that and a bag of chips in terms of its under-the-hood technology, but none of that does a bit of good when hardware is unsupported, Internet-standard codecs don't function, and so forth. Perhaps by the time Microsoft releases the inevitable service pack enough vendors will be on board with good drivers and software updates, but for now Vista just isn't usable in terms of media development, and it's barely usable for even simple playback.

Final Verdict: Mostly Useless

General Observations

Security Done Stupid

I find the most irritating aspect of Vista, from a user perspective, to be its new approach to security. The only problem is that it isn't security; it's pointless irritation. Consider how things work in Linux or on the Mac OS, under which users typically have accounts with limited permissions. When they need to do something that requires administrative rights, they get a pop-up dialog that asks them to supply the credentials of an account with sufficient permissions. I don't understand the internal workings, but for a limited time thereafter they can perform administrative tasks without requiring another interruption. In short, the Linux/Mac approach is quick, simple, secure, and doesn't bug the user any more than it absolutely must.

Now let's talk about Vista. First, there are plenty of circumstances in which operations simply fail without a peep when User Account Control (UAC) is enabled. After I installed Supreme Commander, for example, I ran its GPGNet client to log on to a multiplayer game for testing. The client informed me of an available update, downloaded it, and promptly went off into la-la land, never to return. I had to kill the process manually. When I tried running it again, I got the same behavior. Running it as an administrator made no difference. Only after I disabled UAC altogether, which idiotically requires a reboot, would the GPGNet client update itself. And I should point out that Supreme Commander is one of the only games I own that is supposedly Vista ready!

Second, when UAC doesn't screw you outright, it doesn't add any useful protection. It doesn't intelligently separate the wheat from the chaff, the result of which is a series of indistinguishable allow/cancel pop-ups. As my boss put it, "If I've just started an installation, I'm going to click allow, and if that installation just happens to be corrupted with a virus or something, I'm not going to have any way to know which of the pop-ups I should refuse." I think he's absolutely right. Because the user isn't presented with enough detail to make an intelligent choice when it matters most, the new "security" turns out to be nothing more than new irritation, a bad case of confirmationitis. This kind of stupidity is probably why one of Microsoft's own security partners, Kaspersky, has publicly stated that UAC is so annoying users are simply going to turn it off.

I tried, I really did. I really tried to run under an account with limited privileges, but it was even worse than the Apple parody ad mocking UAC. I got interrupted constantly as I was trying to install software, some installers failed unless I ran them as an administrator—and even then they didn't stop bugging me for confirmation—while others kept crashing until I disabled UAC completely. Frankly, Vista is even worse than XP in this regard. Under XP it was basically impossible to run a secure system and get your daily work done without being hassled. That's just as true in Vista, except that it puts the hassling up front and center, right in the user's face.

That, my friends, is the very definition of security done stupid.

To Steal a User Interface

When it comes to the most obvious enhancement, Vista delivers a far more enjoyable user interface (UI) than XP. Only the most bitter WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pointer) interface haters will consider Vista a step backward. I'm not particularly fond of the whole "glass" thing, with the window frame of the topmost window blurring the windows beneath it, but I do recognize how slick it looks. The animations for opening and closing applications, minimizing/maximizing, etc. are all very slickly done. From startup to shutdown, Vista is the first Microsoft OS that has so highly polished a presentation in every respect. It looks great and has a great "feel" to it as well.

Vista's graphical pedigree is particularly apparent when messing around customizing the desktop. Telling XP to switch themes was always "entertaining", watching windows and their controls flash, go dark, come back, and then repaint furiously after a five to ten second pause. In contrast, Vista is smoothness itself, switching out colors, wallpaper, and seemingly everything else with aplomb. If that's what ditching the old Windows GDI model accomplishes, I'm all for it. Customizing the Vista environment is an actual pleasure because of it, and it's one of the things that makes Vista more enjoyable to use.

The obvious negative comment, of course, is that Microsoft has now boldly gone where Apple has been for years. The Mac OS has had just as much "sheen" or "lickability", to borrow a term I dislike, for some time. And thanks to the Object Desktop suite from Stardock software, it has long been possible to do nearly everything Vista's UI can do on plain old XP, albeit not nearly as smoothly. On the whole, I think it's great that Microsoft has reworked the UI, and for the most part I like the choices they made, but they are clearly playing catch-up in this respect.

Fast Startup

You know what I think I like most about Vista? I'll tell you: its startup is downright snappy. Of course, XP is pretty snappy when first installed, so maybe this will change as time goes on, but Vista is great for the moment. When I type in my password and hit enter to log into XP, I have a solid minute-plus to wait until I can do actual work. That's irritating, particularly if I'm coming back from standby or hibernate and not doing a warm/cold boot. When I first start Vista in the morning it takes a bit longer to make it to the logon screen, but once I'm there and enter my password I'm working within five seconds. The icons practically fly into my system tray, unlike XP.

I suspect it's better at resuming from standby and/or hibernation as well, but I haven't really been able to test it. Apparently, some idiot overlooked the jitter that comes naturally from optical mice, the result of which is that I can't get Vista to standby/hibernate for more than a couple of seconds. I'll bet you mobile users really love that "feature", right? Not only does Vista demand more horsepower, but it's pathologically incapable of sleeping/hibernating. How long do your batteries last, mobile warriors? An hour? Two? I'll bet Vista sucks completely as a mobile OS right now. Still, if you're at a desktop the fast startup times and far quicker gratification are sure to please.

Licensed to Screw

Microsoft just doesn't get it: users dislike activation. When we buy your software, we don't like to be treated like criminals. We don't like the hassle of activating the product we've just legitimately purchased. We don't like how your idiot products hose themselves to the point of requiring reinstallation, which forces us to call some Microsoft drone to get a key because we had the gall to update components in our systems and, as such, have already chewed through the paltry set of activations you supply. And shifting to first person, I positively despise Vista's additional steps along these lines, insofar as the customer supposedly gets one and only one reactivation before the product essentially shuts itself down.

So let me say it for the millionth time: digital rights management (DRM) code does nothing to stop piracy, but it does manage to screw the paying customer. Your OS has been available for download for weeks before it hit the shelves, Microsoft. Cracks for Vista have been available for download since before the launch date. I haven't even downloaded them because, frankly, I didn't care whether Vista worked; I had no plans to buy it anytime soon. But other users, whom I have found to be reliable sources in the past, assure me that the cracks disable activation altogether without the OS catching on and dropping into reduced functionality mode.

In contrast, I've read more than a few accounts from people who have installed software and been told they violated the license agreement, upon which they were given warning of the 72 hours they had to buy a new copy, beg for a second chance, or enter reduced functionality mode. I've read accounts from people whose legitimately purchased keys didn't work at all from day one. I've read accounts of people who thought better of installing Vista on their production machine, uninstalled it, and couldn't activate it on a second machine. In short, your stupid, pointless, counterproductive DRM code is doing nothing to stop the pirates, but it is surely screwing the paying customer. Good job, idiots.

When the day comes that my copy gives me this sort of crap—maybe it will be due to a motherboard change, or perhaps I'll just install the wrong game with retarded DRM—Microsoft has my solemn vow that I will download and use any crack I can find. And I'll be damned sure to post it on my web sites, recommend it to my friends, and generally do everything I can to ensure as many paying customers crack your crappy DRM code as possible. Stop treating us like criminals! Yes, we might as well be a bunch of flies, given that we can't seem to tear ourselves away from the piles of dung Microsoft keeps feeding us, but switching to sugar would make us flies a lot happier. Step up to the plate, Microsoft; be a true leader in the industry; write a reasonable license and ditch the bug-ridden, non-functional, idiotic, pointless DRM crap.

Epilogue

Whew! So here I sit, working in Vista. I'm able to do about 80% of my daily stuff using Vista, and most of it works pretty well. It doesn't work as well as XP, but I expect that will change when Microsoft ships the first service pack (Q2? Q3?). The main thing holding Vista back at present is its surprising level of hardware and software incompatibility, at which I'm really quite surprised. Microsoft did a better job of making sure that software written for 16-bit Windows and even DOS ran better on Windows 95 than they have at making sure that 32-bit XP software still runs on Vista.

I realize that security was (allegedly) a serious focus, though that's hard to believe in light of their security done stupid, and perhaps fixing all the issues with XP security requires a break with the past. But it surely doesn't require destroying backward compatibility with the most widely used audio standard for games; it surely doesn't require keeping XP's impossibly stupid memory model; it surely doesn't require a lot of things that Vista has done. Does it? I'm hardly a security guru, but I'd like to think I'm sharp enough to recognize that Vista's irritate-the-user-constantly approach is less than optimal. I've used Linux; I've used the Mac; Vista is preposterously annoying by comparison and still doesn't make it practical to run as anything but an administrator.

Having said all this, though, I have to confess that there are many things I like about Vista. I like how it seems to multitask more smoothly, save for the audio and video issues. I like how it starts up so quickly. I like how its visual effects and general presentation are so much smoother and more attractive. I like how it seems to manage the fraction of my memory it sees better than XP. I like how it at least tries to improve security. I like how it abandons the stupid "My" prefix on everything (i.e., documents, computer, etc.). I like how it reorganizes user folders; it's still impossibly stupid the way so many settings are stored in the registry, but then the registry is an impossibly stupid idea in the first place.

In short, there are many things I like about Vista. I can imagine how much better my daily computing life might be once I can actually use a system built around the 64-bit version. It will be a system without memory hassles; a system with which my hardware will work; a system on which my software will run. But getting there is going to take more work from Microsoft and hardware/software vendors. Vista's underlying mechanics and the .NET 3.x platform should enable an entirely new breed of applications, which should make it easier than ever before for developers and designers to collaborate in producing applications, which is pretty exciting too.

But for now, I'm sorry, Microsoft, but Vista sucks as a gaming platform, and it sucks as a media platform. It won't be a good choice for me or plenty of others until it can run at least as well as XP. Slap your hardware partners around and get busy on that service pack!

03/28/2007