Now that SP1 for Vista has been released and given some time to settle in, I felt it was time to take the plunge. I’d heard good things about how it was now the OS it always should have been and that manufacturers had actually started releasing drivers for it.

So with that in mind I jumped in with open arms ready to embrace and worship it as the next OS overlord and do you know what? I haven’t been disappointed once.

The problems first started when it wouldn’t let me run the Aero theme, one of the key selling points of vista. This wasn’t down to a lack of memory (2.5GB) or processing power (P4 3Ghz) but my graphics card, fair enough its probably pushing 4 years old but there is a proper vista driver for it at least. The trouble is that Ubuntu had absolutely no problem giving me visual effects that put Vista to shame.

Next there was User Access Control or UAC for short. The idea is that most of the time you just run with normal account privileges and get true admin rights when you really need it. Well done MS you’ve finally done what your competitors have been doing for so many years that even Noah was using the sudo command when he was designing his Ark. While we’re on the subject of sudo I’d like to ask MS a question. ‘Microsoft, where the fuck is the sudo equivalent on Vista, because no one can sodding find it?’ I’ll answer this one on behalf of MS because I don’t think they’ll get back to me ‘There is no sudo command. the work around is to run the cmd prompt as an administrator’. So I’ve either got to start a new cmd process as an admin when I want ‘root’ access or always run it as an administrator and risk accidently stuffing up my system.

(on a side note wordress has just lost the rest of the post from here on so you’ll excuse me if the tone is a bit more pissed off from here)

Now I’d like to say that I’m finished with UAC but unfortunately I’m not. I can live with it always prompting me to say that what I’m doing needs admin rights and do I want to continue, even when I’ve told it to run as an administrator and I can just about overlook it taking over half an hour to install a 5mb program all because it was hiding a ‘You must run this as an admin’ window and I do mean hiding it, so much so that a new error screen came up telling me that there was a hidden window that required action and did I want to view it. But the final straw for UAC was when it wouldn’t let me rename an empty folder on the desktop telling me in an endless loop that I needed to be admin to do it and then telling me I couldn’t rename it because I needed to be a member of the administrator group, even though I was. It did however let me delete it.

So that’s two of Vista’s key selling points that don’t work properly (UAC and Aero)

Next on the list is Media player 11. This one is quite simple it doesn’t work. Yes it will run and play videos but they are jerky and the audio sync is always out. I initially thought that this was down to Vista over stretching my machine but Media Player Classic has no such problem and runs beautifully. Also whenever I go into a folder with video’s in I get a big error message popup essentially saying that it’s crashed trying to create a preview of the video. Oh and embedded videos don’t always display video as well as audio so there goes all of my CBT nuggets training videos that cost me a fortune.

That’s three of the main features down now (UAC, Aero and Media Player 11)

Now I come on to the sidebar which HAS worked flawlessly. You do however need a lot of screen real estate for it. It’s OK’ish on my 17″ widescreen laptop and as I have three monitors on my work PC (which is the machine I’m basing this post on) there’s loads of room for it. The problem is hardly anyone has done anything with it, even Microsoft. It would be amazing if there was a ‘gadget’ to monitor the servers from the side panel or at least some useful status information.

That’s now 4 fails (UAC, Aero, Media player 11 and the Sidebar)

I’m going to ignore Vista’s inability to play any of the games I’ve tried to play on it as this is a work machine and I’d obviously never play games at work cough yeah right cough.

I shall also pass over the sometimes incredibly slow file copies simply because I’m starting to get depressed with all of this negativity.

I will give you a very good reason why Vista hasn’t had a good take up by businesses and it’ not because of the hardware requirements or the price or because it doesn’t really offer any thing new. It’s because the first people to use a new OS in a business are the IT guys and if their day to day tools don’t work properly on it they aren’t going to use it. The adminpak tools suite for managing Active directory and other server services doesn’t work out of the box (TechNet does tell you how to make it work and even provides a batch file to do all of the work for you, but good luck on trying to find that article especially if you didn’t now to look for it in the first place) The SMS console does install as long as you do it from the SP3 CD not that they tell you that either. To get the exchange tabs in active directory users and computers you have to copy several files from the exchange server and register dll’s, this as far as I’m aware is not documented by Microsoft. Exchange System manager won’t work if you have Outlook installed as well, as they use conflicting protocols.

Best of all do you know what Microsoft’s work around for all of those problems is? Remote desktop on to the server and do all of the work from there. That’s like buying a new car and on discovering that there’s no steering wheel the manufacturer telling you to just use the bus.

You’ll remember that in the second paragraph I said I wasn’t disappointed by Vista on a single occasion. This is because I expected to have all of these problems from the outset. I haven’t even touched on the normal problems of trying to find drivers (it was actually quicker to get Mac OS X working than it was to get Vista working on this machine)

There is an upside to all of this though. There now isn’t a single reason that I should carry on using any Microsoft desktop OS. The admin tools that I mentioned earlier were the thing that kept me a faithful slave to windows and if the official answer is to remote desktop on to the server  to use the tools then I’m free. Free to use almost any OS I choose. Linux has an RDP client so does OS X, my iPAQ, my XDA and even my iPhone.

In conclusion I must thank and congratulate Microsoft for creating such an epically pointless and shite operating system. I could go on and talk about some of the other problems of vista or that the RDP solution doesn’t scale, not without spending more money anyway. I could also step in front of a moving bus but I won’t be doing that either.