Strange New Vista

Why Microsoft’s new OS is likely to be a flop

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
4/28/07
http://www.mytown.ca

The first thing to know about Windows Vista is that it’s very pretty. The colors and icons are the epitome of corporate good taste, faultless in their artistic decorum. The OS features an attractive suite of desktop wallpapers, one of which I’m actually using (a 15 second night exposure of Aurora Borealis over a Norwegian Fjord). It is eye candy.

But that’s the best thing you can say for it. It has that bit where it takes all your programs that are on screen or minimized and turns them 45 degrees along an imaginary perpendicular axis – it provokes oohs and aahs, but the reality is that it’s perfectly useless. The screens, tilted away like that, are harder to read than the little two inch screens that appear when you put the mouse over the menu along the bottom bar of minimalized programs, and don’t do anything if you click them except return you to the front program or the desktop.

Vista is also extraordinarily slow. I’ve got an antique 450 MHz at home, and it loads Corel Draw faster than my dual core screamer does. Same with Photoshop, Word, or any other program of any complexity.

Mind you, the week before, when I detailed the problems I had just getting the new computer and getting it running, I noted that when I loaded Linux Ubuntu 64 in, it was “blindingly fast” and that when I had to format and install an XP OEM, the install only took nine minutes, instead of the usual 45. So it’s not the computer.

The fact is that even with a 5600 MHz clock speed, dual core processors, two gigs of RAM and a fast SATA drive, Vista turns a machine into a 486.

In my own case, there was a reason for that. I went to Home Premium Vista because I was told that unlike XP Pro, it could fully use the dual core technology, and of course, it would be a 64 bit operating system.

Turns out that Hewlett Packard scammed me on that. The operating system on my computer is a 32 bit version of Vista, and no, it can’t use the dual core the way it should. They didn’t CLAIM their version of the OS was otherwise: they just withheld that information and let the consumer sucker himself. It’s the sort of predatory crap I’ve learned to expect from both Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.

How did I find this out? I bought a new scanner from Canon, since Hewlett Packard refused to provide drivers on its version of Vista to support my perfectly functional six year old Hewlett Packard scanner. The new Canon came with XP drivers, and while it ran under Vista, the function for scanning negatives and slides didn’t work. I made a quick visit to their website and found Vista drivers. I downloaded the drivers for Vista 64, and was told “This is not a 64-bit version of Vista”. I said “huh?” and went to System in Control Panel. Sure enough, the bastards had foisted a 32 bit version of Windows off on me. I quickly went through all the ads and the materials that accompanied the computer. None mentioned it, one way or the other. At most, they said Windows Vista was designed to take advantage of the new technology, without mentioning that this version of Windows wasn’t going to do that, and an expensive upgrade would be needed in order to do so.

So I shelled out $180 for a scanner because the new version of Windows, which is essentially identical to the old version except for some really useless bells and whistles, won’t support the scanner. Despite it being a Vista tailored for HP, on an HP machine, and an HP scanner. It takes the Canon scanner software to tell me I got scammed.

Vista has a lot of annoyances aside from being slow. Programs – especially non-Microsoft programs – don’t run very well. They tend to stall, and lock up. Granted, I expected that. Some programs wouldn’t run at all, most notably my version of Agent newsreader. Again, I expected that.

When I boot, I get an advisory telling me that some of my start up programs have been blocked, and to click here for details. Clicking doesn’t provide details, and while it’s still fairly easy to find a list of programs in the startup directory, it doesn’t tell you which ones are blocked, or why. My bit torrents program is one of them, though. There were rumors that such programs wouldn’t run on Windows, and in fact they do, but Windows is pissy about it.

Windows has yet to come up with a simple way of transferring files to a CD or DVD that isn’t a time-consuming and irritating kludge.

Vista is supposed to have the ability to take a flash drive or memory card and treat it as RAM. You need an access time of less than one millisecond. You also have to answer the troll’s three questions, it seems, since some flashes work (half-assedly) while others with identical specs do not. And you really need extra RAM in order to get Vista moving. There’s something about watching Vista boot that reminds me of a C5A taking off.

And, as always, there’s the problem that when you have a Microsoft OS, it is Microsoft, and not you, that controls your computer. “For your own good,” of course, except that Microsoft’s notion of such “good” seems to center more around keeping control than around giving you options.

Early reports from the computer community are giving Vista a big thumbs down. It’s telling that there are reports of copies of Window XP Pro OEM disks selling for $150 on Ebay. Yes, that’s more than they originally retailed for ($129). People are looking at Vista, and not liking it, and looking to backtrack. Several large computer companies, pressured into selling all-Vista lines, are now backing away and offering computers with XP as an option – at a premium price, of course.

I have an XP OEM at hand, and also an upgrade copy of XP64, something I didn’t even know existed until just the other day. I have a gap in my work coming up, and I intend to nuke my system, get rid of Vista, and reinstall XP Pro. That will allow me to set up partitions so I can try out other alternatives, including this XP 64, and revisit Ubuntu. There’s a program (described as NOT an emulator, although I’m not sure what else it could be) that runs Windows programs under Ubuntu. The program is called WIND, and the word I get is that while it is complicated and difficult to install, it runs Windows programs beautifully, including all the ones that I use most frequently: Corel Draw 12 (but not X3), Word Perfect, Adobe Suite, Photo Impact and the Dreamweaver Suite. Other programs that I use, such as Mozilla and GIMP, already run quite happily in Linux’ native mode. (One of the chief sponsors of the WIND project, not surprisingly, is Corel).

I regard Vista as an annoying failure. It works, but only barely, and reflects the Microsoft philosophy that it is better to control a captive market than to serve a free one. So I’ll try out Ubuntu/WIND, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll at least go back to XP, which for all its flaws did work reasonably well.