Vista: Two Months Later and Still Mad

In one of this blog's first posts, I wrote that I had just moved over to Microsoft's Vista operating system, and it was making me very unhappy. Tons of incompatibility issues with software and files, and just an overall painful, painful upgrade process.

But I tried to be generous. Laptop magazine promised that the longer you use Vista, the more you come to appreciate it.

Bull.

From a user perspective, there is little about Vista that seems tremendously better than XP. It's internal file organization seems a bit neater and easier to search, but the rest seems mostly cosmetic. (Other user opinions here.)

But the pain hasn't ceased. Vista (especially when paired with the new Office 2007) is a memory hog. Although my new laptop has twice the memory of my old one (1 gig vs 512 MB), it can start running slower as Vista and Office suck up memory.

The compatibility issues never cease. A Microsoft technician helped me get my Cakewalk music recording software booted up on Vista, but the software doesn't run correctly on Vista and recordings get corrupted. I have a Palm Treo 700P. The Palm Desktop software won't work correctly on Vista, though it works fine if I try it on our home XP machine.

Files saved in Office 2007 formats can't be opened by most of the rest of the world, which is still running older Office software. I have to actually save a second copy in an older format if I want to attach it to an e-mail and send it to anyone.

Microsoft has foisted a costly (if you have to buy new software), painful upgrade on us in a way that makes it seem that Microsoft doesn't give a hoot about its customers.

If I'd known that two months ago, I would've bought a Mac.

. □