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…
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According to Computerworld, some malware distributors have acted in a concerted effort to get their sites to the top of seemingly harmless search results. By using bots to spam comments of blogs and even blogs themselves along with other methods, they have abused the pageranking systems utilized by many search engines, such as Google, Live Search, and Yahoo! Search. These pages, though seemingly harmless, may try to trick users into installing fake codecs. Others may not be so upfront about it, installing malware if the user so much as clicks on the page. Most of these attacks use more than one method.

Computerworld interviewed several employees of Sunbelt Software (a security software development company) including Alex Eckelberry, the CEO:

"This is huge," said Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software‘s CEO. "So far we’ve found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages. That’s 40,000 possible pages."

Another employee, malware researcher Adam Thomas identified the core of the threat to users:

"[The page’s IFRAME] is what’s doing the most damage," he said. "It’s loaded with every piece of malware you can think of, including fake toolbars, rogue software and scareware."

According to them, most of these rogue results will have odd URLs, which consist mostly of a jumble of characters attached to China’s .cn domain.

As is the case most of the time, users who keep their computers up to date are least likely to be affected. Additionally, using a modern web browser is a good idea where possible. Of course, when…
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It’s quite an obvious fact that the first release of the Safari 3 public beta for Windows was beta in the very loosest sense of the word, with some venturing to label it “alpha” due to the amount of bugs that really should have been caught before opening up to the public. I’m talking obvious, it’s-right-there-how-could-you-possibly-have-missed-it bugs. The beta did come with a “report bug” feature and this was properly (over)used, but a report bug feature does not a strong case make. 

At WWDC 07, Jobs announced the Windows port of Safari with several slides showcasing how much “faster” Safari was at rendering pages. Directly afterwards he dropped the whole “the Internet is the iPhone development platform” bombshell. At this point it seemed clear that Apple had chosen to port Safari to Windows to include more developers for iPhone apps, and wanted to gain some more marketshare in the process.

Once users got hold of the application itself, most were puzzled. Even in the context of the presentation they had either just seen or read about, the design of the browser seemed inclined for the iPhone developer far more than for the user. The font rendering from OS X was ported over (a huge departure from ClearType and completely unnecessary for browsing the web, though useful for testing, ) the windows could only be resized from one corner, and there was even a keyboard shortcut or two that couldn’t be executed because Windows keyboards don’t have an Option key! 

It seemed…
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That is the question I am posing to you. What is so wrong with Windows Vista that it is considered by CNet UK to be one of the worst tech products ever? If you’ve only used Vista for five minutes at your local Best Buy or something, I don’t think you’re exactly qualified to answer this question. If you have an agenda, you aren’t qualified to answer this question.

I don’t think Vista sucks. I think it is a solid improvement over Windows XP. If I had to buy a PC or use Windows on a regular basis, I would pick Vista over XP in a heartbeat. Does that mean it is flawless? No. Does that mean that there haven’t been issues? Nope; there are issues with every major OS revamp. And there are some rough edges that need a little bit of polish. But it doesn’t suck, and it certainly is not one of the worst tech products in history. You want a miserable failure and a product that is worthy of a worst-product-ever list? Look no further than Microsoft Bob.

And before people start pegging me as a Microsoft apologist, consider this: I am a Mac user. I like my Mac, and I have no plans to switch.

Falling short

Why is Vista perceived to be such a failure? Here are some possibilities:

XP is good enough

Many simply see XP as being “good enough,” and it’s true to a point. I mean, Tiger was good enough for me…
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Windows Live never really was considered the best idea Microsoft has ever had. Couple a deluge of similarly named services with the fact that MSN was making money while Windows Live wasn’t, and you’ve got a great recipe for people to say, “wtf lol?” or, alternatively, “f u M$.” As the months have passed, one thing has become clear: Windows Live is a serious effort to compete with Google. Most of the web services went final earlier this year, including Hotmail, Spaces, Search, Maps, and Home. Now, a second wave of products has left beta, this time targeting Microsoft’s biggest asset: desktop software.

It’s Called Windows Live, not Windows Live. Duh!

I’ve been at somewhat of a loss to figure out just what exactly what to call the thing. Apparently, it’s called Windows Live, as though it’s a separate entity from the other Windows Live (the big one, remember? The one that was here first.) The download button at www.windowslive.com even says “Get Windows Live.” So, I’ll be calling this Windows Live. Sometimes I may say Windows Live, and in those few cases, I mean the project as a whole. Clear as mud? Excellent.

Unified Installer

Microsoft wants you to use all of the Live suite apps. They want you to use them so much that they’ve created one installer for all of them. The “unified installer” as it’s been called, is actually a downloader that goes out and gets the actual applications once you’ve picked which ones you want to…
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