Work While Drunk

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for Windows Vista

I’ve been using Windows Vista for about 4 months now, on my home desktop. Unfortunately, it’s not proving an easy ride. As a frequent early adopter, I’m used to teething problems in hardware and software, but my experience so far is that its just simply poor. It’s a horrible user experience, brings little real benefit over Windows XP right now. Windows is (or should be) all about the interface, usability and accessibility – and it fails on all 3.

Not to be completely negative…

OK, that sounds pretty harsh, and to be fair Windows vista does have some goodness in it. The new look is, largely, quite nice – but perhaps too much of an attempt to visually retaliate against OSX – which many consider to be too much form over function itself. The security is (reportedly) much improved – and I can say it certainly appears to a user that it’s very much a focus with this Operating System. Plus I’m sure there are a number of behind-the-scenes technological improvements. The setup process is undoubtedly much simpler now.

… but it’s not good.

However it doesn’t take long to get frustrated with Vista. The control panel is now like an ant’s nest of interconnected menus. Some things, like networking, are spread across multiple screens of options, within different sections. The control panel is the first call of anyone wanting to setup the OS experience to suit them, so it should be simple to use. Instead it’s actually quite daunting. Of particular note is the much discussed UAC – an awful ‘necessary security’ experience you soon get used to dealing with. I also got completely bemused by the disk manager when trying to create my partitions, and I’m still not convinced its right. I don’t mind if Microsoft has changed something in their OS for the better, so long as the process tells me why (if I want to know) and explains the new process – but it never does, and this makes the user experience learning curve mighty steep.

Inelegant transitions: blackouts

This has always been an inelegance with Windows, but with Vista’s UAC, its now becoming annoying. Whenever the UAC appears or you start a setup application, the screen goes black first, then low-contrast, and pops up a normal contrast window until you make a choice, then it all goes back to normal, via a fade-in. When setting up all my apps when I first installed Windows Vista, I was seeing this effect a few times a minute. It started to make me feel a bit queasy, and I was worried I was going to have an epileptic fit (I’m not epileptic, fortunately for me).

Inelegant Transitions: things don’t stay put

Some games and applications that I use just don’t support my screens preferred resolution, or for some inexplicable reason decide to try and set it again (and thus this has the same effect as changing it). This often causes the blackouts I just described, but is somewhat more understandable (still poor however), but it also has another side effect. Undocked sidebar items and desktop icons, that might have appeared outside of the screen get (perhaps sensibly, so at least you can get to them) pushed inwards or reshuffled, and left in this new position on the return to the desktop. This is completely annoying, especially with sidebar gadgets, as they end up overlapping desktop items on a busy desktop.

Sidebar: worst in class?

In the early days for desktop widget/gadget systems, I found them to be pretty useless and gimmicky. Over time they got prettier, neater and more useful. Now we have such systems built into browsers (Opera), operating systems (Vista and OSX), and of course a plethora of stand-alone systems (Yahoo! Widgets, Samurize and many Sidebar clones). Unfortunately the quality and reliability of gadgets being produced for Vista’s own sidebar is patchy at best – and I don’t know if this is due to the Vista sidebar itself being a limited platform for this kind of development, or just lack of interest from developers. Its early days admittedly, but I’ve not been truly impressed yet. One feature I find it lacking is that when I have undocked a gadget, why can’t I pin it to the desktop? It would help with the issue above for starters.

Stop stealing! Start stealing!

I’ve been getting very frustrated at the seemingly random stealing of focus. I’m not sure what I’m doing to cause it, but some applications (like Opera, Messenger and Outlook) sometime randomly loose focus. As I finger type, I spend periods of time looking solely at the keyboard, so don’t realise that I’m not actually typing into the correct window. It’s incredibly annoying. However, sometimes I want something to steal focus and it doesn’t – like when launching an application that required a UAC action, but instead it sits on my taskbar flashing until I click on it. If I’ve just launched an application, surely I want to see any actions it requires of me to open?

Shut down not the default

The default ‘off’ state in windows vista is sleep (standby) mode. Here in the UK there have been many TV and print ad campaigns by energy companies telling us not to leave our technology on standby, because it’s unnecessary and still uses electricity (and thus costs money). So the clever boys over in Redmond have done the complete opposite, they have changed the default ‘off’ state from an almost no-power usage ‘shut-down’ in XP to a fairly low (but still some) power usage state of ‘sleep’ for Vista. Why? Well as far as I can see it’s just to save face. With Windows XP, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot on this issue. They said they would aim to make the start-up times faster with XP and faster still with Vista – except it’s quite clear that from cold start, Vista isn’t exactly a fast loading OS, it actually tends to be slower than XP. Their solution seems to be to cheat the issue and not actually shut-down the machine, or even hibernate it for than matter (which is missing for me), but instead to merely put it in standby. So it’s essentially still (partially) on.

Wi-fi lost when resuming from sleep (standby)

Many users probably wouldn’t notice, or care, that their PC was in a sleep mode rather than a stone cold shut-down – until they got they electricity bill anyway. Well, except if they are using Wi-fi, because resuming from sleep, quick though it is, seems to play Russian roulette with the Wifi connection. Sometimes it reconnects, sometimes it says it has limited connectivity (a misleading term, it effectively means none at all) and I’ve even had it loose the Wifi adapter altogether on a few occasions.

Start-up: ‘black box’ process

Why does the Windows start-up process have to be like a dark art? I’d like to see what’s actually going on. Like with other operating systems I’ve always thought Windows needs an ‘iconified’ progress system, showing that various components and services are being initialized. It’d be useful for fault and performance diagnosis purposes too, would allow for error and warning messages, and it would actually look quite interesting. Instead, what do we get? – An ugly chunky looking low-res fake progress bar.

In closing…

I’ve not written one of these long ‘rants’ for some time, the last one was while I was still writing for Zombienexus.com, but my continual frustration is getting the better of me. I hope Microsoft can turn it around somewhat with the forthcoming service pack, but my faith is low. Windows XP was rough around the edges at first, but the experience wasn’t so much the problem – it was the security and hardware support in some areas that was lacking. Fixing the experience of Vista with a service pack seems like a lot to expect.

I’m looking to by a laptop in the near future and this will undoubtedly come with Vista pre-installed. I usually want the latest and greatest, but I now feel a bit trapped into the situation. Windows still offers me the best environment for the type of usage I need from a computer, but I’m no longer happy about using it.