I Hate Windows Vista

A couple months ago I blogged an anti-Internet Explorer rant. Today the rant continues-- not just about a web browser, but an entire operating system: Windows Vista. I was merrily typing away at an email and paused to watch some TV, allowing the computer to sit idle for a little while. The screensaver kicked on, and I turned back to the computer, moving the mouse to kill the screensaver and get back to what I was doing. Before my very eyes, my browser window (with my half-finished email) disappeared, as did every other application-- and the entire system shut DOWN! Fortunately I had an automatically-saved draft of my email and hadn't been working on anything else I could've potentially lost.

Still... who needs the blue screen of death when you can just watch your computer shutting down in an orderly fashion, without any prompting from you!?

The interface is tacky, too, I find. I guess it's designed to be "user-friendlier" but the only thing I like is the fact that you can right-click on your desktop and bring up ALL your preferences, not just display options. First thing I did when I set up my account was to revert back to the "Windows Classic" interface. And even then it's laced with Vista-specific foibles. It is still basically ugly and kludgy and hard to manage.

And then... my favorite email client, Outlook Express, which comes built into Windows, was repackaged as "Windows Mail". Okay, not a big deal, as the functionality and interface was basically the same. Until I tried doing simple things like watching a video on YouTube, and discovering it was extremely choppy. I thought it was a lossy internet connection so I downloaded the Flash Video file and tried to view it offline. Made no difference. So I pulled up the task manager to figure out what was going on, and what do you suppose I saw, hogging up an unconscionable amount of CPU power and memory? That's right-- Windows Mail. How can a program as basic as an email client consume that many resources!?!? Oh and speaking of memory-- let's not forget that just to install Vista itself requires an inordinate amount of "minimum" memory and hard disk space. Windows seems to get more and more bloated with each new version it rolls out!

So, in a nutshell-- I am no fan of Windows Vista. Crappy interface, terrible memory hog, unexpected shut-downs... yeah... as soon as we have time I'm gonna revert this thing back to good ol' XP.

Meantime... back to my email. My apologies to the recipient for the even further delays...