Ranting Canuck

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to like Microsoft products for the most part but I tend to really slag Microsoft as a company. Generally speaking they make decent products but as a company they make stupid decisions.

This brings us to Microsoft latest operating system Vista. I put off installing Vista until really recently, I really just did not see what it would do for me to be honest with a couple of exceptions. This in and of it self is a major change for me since historically ever since Windows 95 I have installed every Microsoft operating system as soon as it was released. However, I really did not feel the need to do so in the case of Vista.

Simply because with the exception of some eye candy it really does not give me anything as a home user and gives you nothing if you are business user. As a home user the only thing that it gives you is Direct X 10, which is presently only available for Vista. If you are a hardcore gamer then yes you are going to want Direct X 10 and vista. I play games but I hardly would consider myself a hardcore game and presently all new games are supporting Direct X 10 and Direct X 9.0.

I have found that Vista is no more stable then XP was, if anything it is little less stable. Microsoft claims that it is more secure, I will believe this when I see it. One of the main security features in Vista is User Access Control that causes the user to grant permission for a program to access certain key areas of the operating system.  This is an extremely annoying feature and I looked up on the internet how to disable about 10 minutes after installing the operating system.

For the business user Vista really does not give you anything at all, at least not enough to justify the costs of upgrading. As a corporate user chances are you will not care at all about all the eye candy that vista provides and it being more secure is said very tongue in cheek. I find that most of my clients are simply avoiding Vista like the plague they do not want the headaches of dealing with two end user operating systems and they see no reason to upgrade to Vista from XP. Also many custom applications simply will not run on Vista without major rewrites, a lot of commercial applications have vista issues also.

Another beef I have with Vista is that they have kludged how it is licensed. With XP you had home edition and professional edition; these two versions confused a lot of people. With Vista you have five editions available in North America and Seven available worldwide. Five versions of an operating system is absolutely ridiculous and the only thing that it has done is confuse the consumer. They should have just release Visa Home and Vista Ultimate or as I call it the Vista Pirate Edition.

The amount of digital rights management (DRM) that Microsoft has included with the Vista is unprecedented. It is clear that the American Motion picture industry forced Microsoft to add such features as Protected Video Path, but this certainly does nothing to help the consumer.

Another complaint and one that is  pretty universal is that that system requirements for vista are pretty high. This is primarily due to the aero, which is the new user interface that ships with most version of Vista. While Aero looks nice to run properly it requires a pretty powerful graphics card, generally only found in gaming systems or high performance corporate desktops.   Again do we really needs transparent windows and other eye candy in an operating system? I feel there is something wrong when my operating system has higher system requirements then many games!

Something else that is clear is that Vista was rushed and it was not ready for release when it was released. This says a lot for an operating system that came out four year after it expected release in late 2003. When Vista first came out it was full of bugs the most famous being one that caused for extremely slow file performance. Microsoft initially denied there was a problem but then released a patch that resolved it. Historically most corporations do not deploy a new copy of windows until service pack 1 is released. Microsoft knows this and because of it they are rushing the release of service pack 1, this has caused many in the IT community to recommend waiting until service pack 2.

I know I have been pretty hard on Microsoft and Vista in this article, but again there are so many things about this operating system that just drive me nuts. I am in running Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition on my home PC and I have very little problems with it. I did the upgrade installation from XP Pro installation and the install went smoothly after I removed some programs that Vista’s installer refused to run because they where installed. The one issue that I am having is that for ever reason I am not able to make backup’s of movies on my system since I installed

While I have not had a lot of problems running Vista it really has not given me anything as a home user who games. I presently do not have a graphics card that supports DX10, I have not upgraded since there are no games that have been released that require DX10 that I want to play.