My personal experiences with Windows Vista

Now after Windows Vista is released to the public I felt it was time to share my own personal experiences. After the release of vista on MSDN back in November I was very eager to try I out. So I installed it on my main machine. After I was done installing I directly had a two huge of problems:

First of all my network card was not recognized and I had to install XP drivers. These drivers seemed to working but I did not get a IP address from my DHCP server. So I had to use an static IP address, but after each reboot I had to ping my router before I got an active connection. I got so frustrated with this that I bought a new standard intel network card which was recognized directly and worked just fine.

Secondly I’m having trouble with the nvidia videocard. Every time I press this button which renders all open windows in 3D, I get distortion on my screen, which will eventually result in a reboot. But I figured out a work around.. I never press this button.. :-S

But the problems I described before are not issues which are entirely Microsoft’s fault.

Besides these two major problems Vista is stabile and everything seems to be working ok. But the thing which bothers me the most about Vista is the fact I cannot find out the added value. A lot of people are talking about the improved user experience..

Ok I’m working with Vista now for 3 months and I have not found this improved user experience.. I did found some overhyped functions and some personal frustrations..

Let me give some examples:

-         The sidebar.. I cannot find any added value in this.. thing.. It just sits on the side of your screen and shows a clock.. or other stuff.. wow.. I never missed it in WindowsXP and I never look at in Vista..

-         Aero interface.. Wow.. it look nice.. but the XP look is not so bad either..

-         Outlook webaccess doesn’t work.. And this sucks!

-         Citrix doesn’t work.. this also sucks..

-         Virtual PC 2004 doesn’t work..

-         I you use readyboost to boost your performance, your machine is going to swap files the first 15 minutes after each reboot.

-         I just get the overall feeling that Microsoft tried to design to UI of Vista for inexperienced users (and they could have done it better) and the left the experienced users out in the cold.

-         I see some similarities with Apple software like the (totally crappy) iTunes in e.g. the idea to store all media files in library. I you use multiple hard disks you have to change al sorts of settings in order to add your media files to a library. Maybe I’m getting old but a normal folder structure works better for me.

-         When windows XP was released, every thing was just better.. with Vista I feel I had made a step backwards.

Anyway I hope that a lot of problems are going to be solved soon. Lets hope all the problems I experience are just startup problems and that time will heal all wounds..