A long, slow train wreck

No, not my life - Micro$oft's Windows Vista operating system. What a disaster! I bought a brand new laptop from my sister-in-law (she bought it because she thought she needed it; she didn't.). It came with one of the higher-end flavors of Vista on it, so - despite all the negatives I've heard and read - I thought I'd try it for myself. After a day of use and the resulting total frustration with Vista, I spent several hours installing dual-boot capability and put Windows XP on the system. Now the only time I boot up Vista on the machine is if one of the kids wants to watch a DVD on it, simply because I haven't gotten around to installing the XP DVD player software. Did I mention that Vista is a complete failure in my opinion? I have the tech chops to fall back to XP and dual-boot my systems, but I pity someone who is technically inept getting a new computer for Christmas and ending up being stuck with the sugar-coated dog turd that is Vista.

Now comes yet another report on Vista's inability to perform even simple file operations: copy, move and delete. Apparently Vista takes many hours to perform what previous versions of Windows did in mere minutes. By Vista's estimate, some file operations would take literally thousands of hours (although I understand that Service Pack 1 is supposed to cut that time in half)! The speculation is that Micro$oft's Digital Rights Management is to blame for the file movement delays. That is, when the DRM allows you to copy stuff at all or doesn't actually lock your system because it thinks you're not playing by the rules with regard to media files. Even if you are. Yet another Vista goodie. So, like a lot of other folks (including, it is rumored, most of the people at Micro$oft) I'm going to continue using XP and avoid getting entangled in the long, slow train wreck that is Vista.


[Posted on Day Zero of Zappadan.]