Comment Don't Do It. (Score 5, Interesting) 912
I've been on Vista for 3 months now. When I bought my new Thinkpad I made the leap, thinking that it would be better to be slightly ahead of the curve than to have to upgrade my OS at a later point. Big mistake. Don't do it. Below is a quick summary of the hassles I have endured since day one, and continue to endure. Anyone else see this shit?
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I had the computer I would regularly hit this mysterious key combination by mistake, causing weird accented characters to begin appearing in my code. I finally got frustrated, did a Google and found some instructions on how to disable this key combination. I don't remember how I did it, there were 5 or 6 convoluted steps involved. Pointless and annoying.
- Every few days, I suddenly notice I have no sound on the computer. I look down at the taskbar and, sure enough, the little speaker icon has a red circle and line through it. When I hover over it, I am told that "there is no audio device installed on this computer." Strange, huh, since I usually have sound and have never changed the sound settings on my computer at all. Reboot. Problem fixed. Until next time...
- Flash MX has a fun habit of reverting to old versions of files. Before closing the app, I carefully select "Save All" from the File menu. Then I close everything and close the app. Later, when I go back in and re-open the project, often it is some random old version from a day or so earlier. Horrifying. To get around this, I now have to keep a separate copy of my Actionscript code saved in .txt files created through Notepad. Before closing Flash, I copy-and-paste my revised code into the text file and save it. After opening Flash, if the file reverting thing has happened, I copy-and-paste the code back from Notepad into Flash. Absolutely ridiculous. Never saw this problem in XP, needless to say.
- There is much more, but I'm tired of typing...I won't even get into the annoying "Are you sure you wish to run this program?" dialogues that the Apple commercials made fun of. It is EXACTLY like that. I turned it all off because there was just no way I could maintain any sort of productivity or sanity with all those dialogues. What the hell were they thinking....
- Yes, it's slow. I hear the figure 20% tossed around, but it seems much slower than that compared to XP. My new laptop has exactly four times the RAM of my old one that ran XP, and a processor that is over twice as fast. The hard drive is 5 times larger. Yet my Vista machine seems to run at about the same speed as the old one... and that one had four years of installs and re-installs on it, and an 80% full hard drive. What did I just pay for, again? Needless to say, to maximize performance I have turned off the transparent windows and all the other fancy gimmickry, which make my upgrade even more pointless now.
- When Vista becomes "stressed", such as when I open too many apps, rather than simply becoming slower as was the case on XP, weird behaviours begin to occur. Everything still opens and seems to operate normally. But then the weirdness kicks in, the most frustrating example being the disappearance of buttons and other widgets in dialogues. For example, effects windows will open in Photoshop with all the buttons and sliders that let me tweak the effect. But then when I go to apply it... lo and behold, there is no "Apply" or "OK" button. Just vacant grey space. Fantastic. This happens in many applications, though it does seem to be getting less frequent (maybe those daily patches are helping, hmm).
- When application A crashes or starts running slowly, strange behaviours (such as the missing dialogue buttons mentioned above) will start happening in some other random application B. When I close application A, application B starts working normally again. Annoying.
- When apps start to crawl or crash, and I have to kill them, a helpful "Would you like to save your changes?" dialogue pops up. Of course I would. But sometimes the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons are missing. So I can't save my content. Fine, I think, I'll just select the text in the file, copy it to the clipboard, and in a few minutes I'll open a new file and past it back in. No such luck. When apps begin to crawl or crash, copy-and-paste to the clipboard will not work. Bottom line: you're screwed. Notepad is the most frequent app to display this behaviour.
- I can't print to my printer. It's a common, cheapo Canon. Worked fine from the get-go when I plugged it in to my Mac or my old XP machine, but Vista fails to recognize that any printer is installed at all. Spent a bit of time digging around looking for drivers or settings, got annoyed. Now I just email my files to my Mac and print from there. Welcome to 2007.
- When Vista starts to crawl or crash, and I can't close apps normally, I want to open the Task Manager to kill the offending process. About 50% of the time, however, it won't open, either through the CTRL-ALT-DEL menu or by right clicking on the taskbar. Great. What's the point of having a Task Manager if, when you need it most, it is often not available? Reminds me of Windows 95.
- Every few days, the menus in my IE 7 suddenly disappear. If I right-click on the menu area, the menu pops up and there is a checkmark beside "Menu Bar". Strange. But regardless of whether I check or uncheck this, the menus are still missing. So I randomly check and uncheck some other widgets, like "Links" or the "Google Toolbar". Then I recheck the menus bar. The menus reappear! For now. Whether this is a specific IE 7 issue or a Vista one... I can't say.
- Some mysterious key combination - I believe it involves SHIFT or ALT something - causes the keyboard layout to switch instantly from US to whatever else is installed, in my case Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard. For the first month I had the computer I would regularly hit this mysterious key combination by mistake, causing weird accented characters to begin appearing in my code. I finally got frustrated, did a Google and found some instructions on how to disable this key combination. I don't remember how I did it, there were 5 or 6 convoluted steps involved. Pointless and annoying.
- Every few days, I suddenly notice I have no sound on the computer. I look down at the taskbar and, sure enough, the little speaker icon has a red circle and line through it. When I hover over it, I am told that "there is no audio device installed on this computer." Strange, huh, since I usually have sound and have never changed the sound settings on my computer at all. Reboot. Problem fixed. Until next time...
- Flash MX has a fun habit of reverting to old versions of files. Before closing the app, I carefully select "Save All" from the File menu. Then I close everything and close the app. Later, when I go back in and re-open the project, often it is some random old version from a day or so earlier. Horrifying. To get around this, I now have to keep a separate copy of my Actionscript code saved in
- There is much more, but I'm tired of typing...I won't even get into the annoying "Are you sure you wish to run this program?" dialogues that the Apple commercials made fun of. It is EXACTLY like that. I turned it all off because there was just no way I could maintain any sort of productivity or sanity with all those dialogues. What the hell were they thinking....
