Some people don’t think Windows Vista sucks, but I respectfully disagree. I think Windows Vista is a horrible operating system that is incredibly inefficient, unproductive, and requires the end user go through too many hassles and jump through too many hoops to accomplish basic tasks. What’s worse is that Microsoft spent billions of dollars and years and years developing it. It should be spectacular, or at least decent. It’s not.

I’m going to cover several common tasks that a typical end user goes through while using a computer. These typical tasks include changing the settings of your system, printing, opening and saving files, browsing for files, searching, switching between documents and applications, and accessing files and applications in the file browser. A typical user will do all of these many times in a given day.

In this first section I’ll cover using the control panels to change your system settings. End users sometimes find themselves wanting to access the system’s settings for various reasons on any given day. They might want to change the refresh rate of their monitor, or just check to see what its value is, or they might want to check to see what their IP address is. People typically have volume controls on their computer hardware, especially on laptops, but they sometimes need to access the sound control panel as well. How easy is it to find and use these control panels in Vista? How does Vista fare in this regard? Terribly. In many ways, Windows is a giant game of Where’s Waldo, requiring the end user to hunt for what they are seeking.

A Windows Vista user usually accesses the control panels by clicking on the Start Menu icon in the bottom left of the Task Bar and then clicking on Control Panel. On a default install of Vista, this brings up Control Panel Home. So far so good. But instead of finding icons for each control panel, like Mouse, Sound, Displays, Printer and Network, we are presented with an array of text of categories and tasks that we need to read. Instead of a simple icon of a display that contains all of your display options, we have sentences like “Adjust screen resolution.” This is less identifiable and it takes me longer to find what I want because I have to read phrases and sentences versus seeing an icon of a display and clicking on that to get all the options for displays.

Control Panel Home has 11 main menu items, or categories—System Maintenance, Security, Network and Internet, Hardware and Sound, Programs, Mobile PC, User Accounts and Family Safety, Appearance and Personalization, Clock, Language, and Region, Ease of Access, and Additional Options. Under each main category are sub-categories, or shortcuts, that sometimes describe tasks that take you to specific control panels and other times are just words like Printers. Adding it all up, Control Panel Home gives you roughly 33 different links to sift through when you want to find the refresh rate of your monitor.

That’s the main problem with posing the end user with tasks versus easily identifiable control panels like Display, Mouse, Sound, CDs & DVDs, or Network—there are several tasks to describe for each control panel and you can’t predict what the end user’s need is, so many users fall through the cracks and don’t see their task listed and have to hunt for it. Is it under Hardware and Sound or is it under Appearance and Personalization or something else? Where is Waldo?

I know that resolution, color depth and refresh rate have to do with my display, so it’s a good bet that all of those features are under Displays in OS X, and they are. Features relating to the use of energy, like sleep, are under Energy Saver. In Vista, your battery options are under Hardware and Sound and under Mobile PC.

Clicking on any main menu item in Control Panel Home takes you to a new menu with options for that category. For example, clicking on Hardware and Sound brings up a new menu with fifteen choices along, with a side panel on the left with the main categories listed from Control Panel Home main menu.

The menu for Hardware and Sound is, in order: Printers, AutoPlay, Sound, Mouse, Power Options, Personalization, Scanners and Cameras, Keyboard, Device Manager, Phone and Modem Options, Game Controllers, Windows SideShow, Pen and Input Devices, Color Management, and Tablet PC Settings. Still looking for display settings?

This menu is too long to fit in the default control panel window, so there is a scroll window. I have to scroll to see the whole list, which adds to the fun of trying to find Waldo by having features hidden in a scroll window where I get to manually scroll down to discover what’s there. Oh, and you think we are done with the menus and submenus? No way! Some of those menu items go to another menu that replaces our whole panel again.

Let’s click on Personalization. I get a new menu, replacing the last one (which replaced the first one) and I have these options: Window Color and Appearance, Desktop Background, Screen Saver, Sounds, Mouse Pointers, Theme, and Display Settings. That is where our display control panel is located! Yippee, we found Waldo! We only had to go three levels deep to find it.

So instead of putting Displays on Control Panel Home, Microsoft wants me to go three levels down to find it, at the bottom of the list. By the way, that left pane that had the main menu for Control Panel Home has now been replaced with tasks. These are the same as the shortcuts under the menu items but Microsoft has decided to put them over here for this screen instead of under the menu items.

There is a shortcut for “Adjust screen resolution” under Personalization. So they put a shortcut to a control panel that’s buried away versus just putting that control panel on the home. But someone who is looking for the refresh rate setting is probably looking for Monitors or Displays, and not “Adjust screen resolution.” Maybe Microsoft should make even more room and put “Adjust refresh rate” on Home and also “Adjust color depth” and we can scroll six or seven pages through all of that.

Notice anything about this hierarchy? Under Hardware and Sound is a menu item called Mouse, but under Personalization is Mouse Pointers. Both bring up the same panel for Mouse, but Mouse Pointers is just one tab of several in the Mouse Properties panel. And Display Settings is a couple levels under Hardware and Sound but it is also under Appearance and Personalization. It’s like Microsoft couldn’t decide which one to put it under so they did both, which wastes user interface space and requires the end user to decipher way more information than is necessary. Instead of having “Adjust screen resolution” in two different locations, a few levels down in the hierarchy, just put Displays on Control Panel Home. That wouldn’t be as much fun, I guess.

So one reason Vista’s control panels suck is because they aren’t very discoverable. It’s a big hassle trying to find out where you can change common settings. This is very common with Microsoft software in general, and it’s the reason why Microsoft tech support forums are loaded with “Where do I find...” questions. (In fact, sometimes the #1 feature request for Microsoft software is a feature that is already in the software, but people don’t know it’s there.) OS X Leopard’s System Preferences have only four categories and the control panels are obvious and presented all on one page with names like Network, Dock, Displays, and Sharing.

So Vista’s control panel GUI design really is awful. It’s the reason most Windows users I know use Classic View, which lets you see the control panels in the way they should be viewed, as icons by control panel name. This is how Windows 95 did it, but Windows XP introduced the “new and improved” method. Everyone pretty much hated it, yet Microsoft kept it in Vista. The only saving grace with Vista’s control panels is the search field that lets one type in what one is looking for. This helps, but typing in “sound” gives 17 results that the user must sift through.

OK, so we talked about discoverability: how to find the control panel you want. Once you get there, how easy is it to use that control panel and find the specific feature you want for that control panel? We found the control panel we want, how do we change the setting we want to change? Well, it’s complicated.

One of the most common needs for the Mouse control panel is to change the speed of the mouse cursor as you move the mouse around your desk. Where has Microsoft put this feature? Well, Microsoft starts off well by putting a Mouse shortcut under Hardware and Sound in Control Panel Home. Click that and you get the Mouse Properties panel. But that’s the easiest it gets.

My Mouse Properties panel has five tabs. Five. OK, but surely the most common setting people want to access for the mouse is the first one presented, right? Well, no. What is the first option you are presented with when you launch the mouse control panel? Apparently, Microsoft thinks people want to swap the primary and secondary buttons of the mouse on a regular basis. That is the first option on the first tab of the Mouse control panel—“Switch primary and secondary buttons.”

The second option of the first tab is Double-Click speed.

The third option is ClickLock.

OK, I browse through these options and I don’t find the mouse speed. Surely the second tab in the Mouse control panel has the speed? Nope.

The second tab in the Mouse control panel is Pointers. This tab lets you change the graphic of the mouse “pointer.” What everyone else calls a cursor, Microsoft calls a “pointer.” So Microsoft thinks the most common use of the mouse control panel is swapping the primary and secondary mouse buttons and the second most common thing people want to do is configure the graphic of your cursor.

What’s the third tab? “Pointer Options”. Huh? I have a whole tab dedicated to “Pointers” and then I have “Pointer Options” as a separate tab? Yes. Microsoft has dedicated two tabs to pointers. I guess there aren’t any “options” under the Pointers tab so they have one called Pointers Options.

I want to change the speed of my mouse and I have to go to the third tab titled Pointer Options, which is located next to Pointers, and I have to click on the Motion slider, not Speed. I guess Microsoft thinks it would be too easy to have it labeled Speed, so they use something more ambiguous like Motion. That’s much more fun than just having a Mouse or Keyboard and Mouse control panel on Control Panel Home and letting the very first tab feature something called Mouse Speed or Tracking Speed.

You think this is just a fluke? Try finding out quickly what your current IP address is with the control panels. Really quickly—click on the “Network status and tasks” shortcut located under Network and Internet in Control Panel Home. This brings up Network and Sharing Center. To the right of Connection is View Status. Clicking that spawns a new dialog called Local Area Connection Status. Now click on the Details button. A new screen comes up with information about your connection, and buried in there is your IP address. Where is your display’s refresh rate? Click Appearance and Personalization, Personalization, Display Settings to bring up the Display Settings panel, then click on Advanced Settings at the bottom, then click on Monitor, the second tab. There is your refresh rate!

Windows Vista, in general, is a plethora of panels loaded with tabs containing Properties buttons with more Advanced Properties buttons inside. Microsoft is all about vomiting features onto their software and just letting it stay wherever it sticks, and the control panels in Vista are a great example of this. They put the features that are most commonly used right in the middle of a bunch of crap many people don’t care about. Let’s look at this by continuing to examine a simple mouse control panel with five tabs.

The fourth tab in the Mouse Properties control panel is Wheel. This features two controls occupying the entire panel: Vertical Scrolling and Horizontal Scrolling. The fifth tab is Hardware, which tells me I have a trackpad on my laptop and a mouse also connected. Isn’t this stuff under Device Manager? Yep, it’s there too. Having things in multiple places makes it easier to play Where’s Waldo.

One third of the Hardware tab is blank, but there is a Properties button at the bottom. Clicking on Properties under the Hardware tab in the Mouse Properties control panel gives me… a new panel with three more tabs!

The first tab is General. Hey, why didn’t they just use General as the first tab in Mouse Properties and have the mouse speed and click speed and scroll speed there? Why have it buried? Well, we couldn’t play Where’s Waldo if they didn’t hide it.

The General tab uses an entire panel to tell me that my mouse is a mouse (Device type), that the maker of my mouse is Microsoft (actually it’s not, but the driver is), and that the location is on USB. Half of this panel is dedicated to a single line of information: “This device is working properly”.

At the bottom of the first tab of the HID-compliant Mouse Properties panel under the Properties button of the fifth tab, Hardware, of the Mouse Properties control panel (are you lost yet?) is a button called Change settings. Care to guess what this does? We are getting really deep now, be careful. Clicking on this button brings up the User Account Control dialog asking me if I want to continue. I click Continue. The dialog disappears and now I still have the General tab and the Change Settings button has disappeared. Wasn’t that fun? It’s like a game! What it actually does is it unlocks the buttons in the next tab, Driver. Are you kidding me? Yeah, there’s no Unlock button on the Drivers tab, it’s located in the General tab. So when you are in the Driver tab and you want to make edits to the options there, you can’t because they are locked. You have to go to the General tab and click on Change Settings to unlock the features on a completely different tab. I’m guessing that there are many people on the tech support forums asking how to unlock those features.

What’s even more fun is that clicking on Change Settings also makes a forth tab appear, Power Management. It wasn’t there before, now it is. Where’s Waldo now?

The second tab of the HID-Compliant Mouse Properties panel is Driver. Clicking on that gives you… five buttons—Driver Details, Update Driver...,"Roll Back Driver, Disable, and Uninstall. As I already stated, these buttons are grayed out if you haven’t clicked on Change Settings in the General tab.

Clicking on Driver Details gives me...a third panel! I now have four panels in front of me. Wow. So I have a Driver File Details panel (I clicked on the Driver Details buttton, not Driver File Details) in front of me and I see two files listed in the Driver files field: “C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouclass.sys” and “"C:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\mouhid.sys". OK. No options here, just an OK button. Clicking OK makes that panel disappear.

The second button is Update Driver.... Clicking on this brings up a another, completely different panel that is a wizard and gives me two options, “Search automatically for updated driver software” and “Browse my computer for driver software.” This panel is about six inches wide and five inches tall and it gives me two options in all that space.

Let’s not beat a dead horse and finish this up—the third tab of HID-Compliant Mouse Properties is Details. Clicking on this gives me a Property pop-up menu with a long, long list of “Device descriptions”. We have “Hardware Ids” and “Device class” and “ConfigFlags” and “Bus number"… it’s a very long list. This is presented on a default install of Vista to the end user.

Is Waldo in there?

The fourth tab of the HID-Compliant Mouse Properties dialog, spawned by a Properties button in the Hardware tab of the Mouse Properties control panel, is Power Management. Clicking this gives me two little check-boxes—“Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power,” which is grayed out, and “Allow this device to wake the computer.”

Wouldn’t these two features be under some kind of control panel related to energy? One would think.

The control panels of Windows Vista are a mess. It’s almost like an OS parody, but it’s not. As we’ll see in future parts of my Vista review, the control panels aren’t the only aspect of this operating system that puts the end user though mystifying user interfaces and hassles.