Vista looks like someone hit XP with a laminating machine
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Which is my way of saying: I think it is butt-fugly.
This is the Aero look, where translucency, shadows and psuedo-reflections abound. It’s like a team of Microsoft middle managers crowded around OS X and decided that they could beat those latte-sucking Apple snobs at their own game, having apparently never heard the adage Less is More.
Buttons on windows don’t just change color when you hover your mouse over them, they also emit an eerie fuzzy glow, as though being viewed through a foggy window. The window frames themselves have this blurry translucent effect on them, so you can see underlying windows well enough to be visually distracting (but not enough to be useful). And inexplicably the heavy drop shadows around windows don’t appear to extend under them, which implies that either a) the windows have some sort of illuminating effect on the screen immediately beneath them or b) Microsoft’s designers don’t give a shit about visual consistency.
Windows and dialog boxes swell and shrink when you open and close them, which adds a kind of temporal blurring effect to the visual fuzziness inherent in the interface already. The whole thing feels squidgy; the opposite of crisp.
And this squidginess goes beyond aesthetics; Vista’s performance compared to WinXP is pathetic. It takes forever to start up, and something as simple as closing an explorer window can takes up to 3 seconds! The mouse cursor is constantly doing the glinting blue ring of eternal waiting. And it’s as though when I press a button or select an item the system is saying "dude, wait wait, I’m going do something cool………… check it out, I’m glowing!"
And UAC… I’ve heard people bitching about this but wasn’t sure why… every time I open network preferences or similar "sensitive" settings I get a "are you sure this is OK?" dialog. That in itself mightn’t be so bad, but in this install at least I get a half second black screen before this thing comes up, and then again when it goes away, and each time I get this shock because for a moment it feels like the computer has spontaneously crashed. OS X causes less irritation even when it forces me to enter a password!
When an operating system is superceded, it’s successor should be faster, not slower. When you the user are simply choosing which application you want to run, there is no excuse for sluggishness. If Vista looked smoking hot then maybe I could understand, but it looks like shit! Cheap plastic laminated shit!
And so another Vista install has bitten the dust, as I have now downgraded this mid-range Sony Vaio* to good ol’ WinXP, and it finally feels like the new machine that it is. I can’t say for sure that all of its sluggishness was due to the Vista install, since big vendors like Sony are notorious for bogging down their machines with proprietary "Crapplets", but as first experiences go this was the pits, and it jibes perfectly well with the stuff I’ve been hearing from others.
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* No I haven’t bought yet another computer— I am doing this downgrade as a favour to an extremely dissatisfied Vista user.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Totally my thoughts!
Nothing about the design of Vista feels slick or intuitive.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:34 am
The only people that seem to be running Vista on purpose are doing a dual boot so they can run directx 10, which curiously is a vista “exclusive” (read: 100% transparently due to artificial DRM restrictions.)
July 15th, 2008 at 5:50 am
I spent about 30s with Aero before I went straight back to the windows classic theme (or rather disabled the themes service, along with UAC and a bunch of other cruft), now it looks like win 95, runs like a greased whippet, and no major crashes, although obviously there has to be at least one person in the world who Vista works for, and that’s me, sorry everyone else :)
July 15th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I totally agree on every point. I turned off the blurry window edges immediately & wonder how many power stations are now needed around the world to support these excesses. I can’t believe the screen black-out thing wasn’t fixed with the first update. I wonder whether the endless confirmation boxes help security or just act as a disclaimer for MS (”You pressed OK!”).
Some other Vista observations:
* Alt-tab often stops working meaning I have to resort to the windows-tab with its gimmicky 3-D window stack view. More power stations.
* Here are some issues I had late last year which appear to be fixed with updates: it used to enter an apparent endless loop while copying files from one drive to another (like who does that?!) and I had a TIFF file that bluescreened it in the early days.
* The turn off screen has regressed to pre-XP days requiring you to choose every option except ‘Sleep’ from a pull-down menu before clicking ok.
* I have a 5 year old XP laptop that produced thumbnails from a CD of photos in less than 10% of the time my latest model vista laptop takes. Can’t say it was a definitive test as there may have been some caching going on…
OTOH:
The boot time is acceptable on my machine.
Most software runs ok.
I think MS has lost the plot on what an operating system is. Their customers only want incremental (and stable) updates, not a sea-change every 5 years.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:18 am
The combination of a Sony Vaio [a whole new category of shitware] and Vista would have to be the worst I have come across - but the really amazing thing is the depth of normal user hatred for Vista.
I’ve had one guy call me up and say “Now look, I know I’m a stupid fucking turd brained fucktard but when I bought my $5k Vaio I specified Vista Ultimate… I’ve already tried Sony, Microsoft and my Corporate Support with no success… is there any way I can get onto a wireless network?” - Turned out to be a fairly subtle issue but the point is that none of the software even gave a hint of what what wrong - it just claimed the classic “check username and password and try again” [hey Mark, how much does it make you love your developer buddies when you find an error message as insulting as that one?]
Back in the day my clients didn’t seem to get it that “Windows ME” was a pile of poo - But they all seem to know that Vista sucks balls… I keep getting calls saying “I want to buy this new laptop [dell, toshiba whatever] but I can only get it with Vista - can I just ship it direct to you and get XP installed?”
I’ve been providing computer support since ‘92 and I’ve never seen anything like it. The bad feelings are very strong with one.
As what I’m pretty sure is irony… I’ve had to purchase a MacBook [and Vista] just so I can run Vista well enough to offer reasonable support my Vista users.
Just when I start to think my job might be at risk from the maturation of the PC platform Bill gives me one last gift.
Thanks Microsoft for keeping my family sheltered and fed.
July 15th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
i disabled the bundled norton firewall software and reactivated the vista firewall.
time taken: 21 minutes.
Security agent OK buttons: 329!
That’s a button every 4 seconds!
fcuk me with a barge poll. it makes wankers like me really want to scream out, just get a fracken mac..
July 17th, 2008 at 2:25 am
you guys realise you can switch of UAC and turn down the aero interface to vista basic? there’s no need to bitch about it ;-)
vista 64 works seamlessly on my pc. very very stable.
readyboost and superfetch are excellent technologies. superfetch has made my windows experience noticably faster since vista worked out which apps i use regularly. It would be more constructive to malign the features of Vista that require more meaty hardware that *can’t* be switched off. personally, I think Vista falls short because WinFS was not delivered. 6 years to develop vista as we see it leads you to believe MS were sat on their ar$es the whole time… but they did develop WinFS. where the hell is it?!
July 18th, 2008 at 2:01 am
and what is your hardware spec, Michael…? Not exactly typical consumer level I suspect ;) I do know that I could/can change options to make the system more usable, but unfortunately I can’t do that every time I am forced to use Vista on someone else’s machine.
Someone at Microsoft decided it was a good idea to ship Vista with default settings that included Aero and UAC weirdness, and in doing so they ensured themselves a place in Hell, somewhere between telemarketers and the people who create those “someone has a crush on you!” banner ads.
BTW Thank god they didn’t ship with WinFS as default, it would have made the downgrade a nightmare
July 18th, 2008 at 5:20 am
touche on the machine spec Mark ;)
It’s difficult not to turn these discussions into fanboi riots and when you take a cold hard look at both out of the box - as they stand now - you do require beefier hardware from a pc to get the same ‘apparent’ performance from the mac.
possibly my vista experience is trouble free because I know what i am doing and see and tweak before problems manifest themselves. am I’m happy. are you more abstracted from the concrete reality of osx than you are with vista? when it goes wrong in osx, does it really hit the fan?
also, do you practically have to be connected to the net with a mac? my machine hasn’t been on the net (easier life for me without defender, firewall, intrusive virus software, etc) and i retrieve patches/driver updates/ etc from work.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:25 am
sorry about the directionless reply.
I was looking forward to a constructive vista/osx post, but i guess that won’t be forthcoming now :’(
July 18th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Hey your reply is fine :) I am always online and OS X is much less intrusive with its updates than Windows from my experience (which likes to steal focus to suggest you restart for latest updates).
I will continue sporadically complaining about Vista/OS X/WinXP no doubt, but a level comparison is kind of difficult since I use them quite differently.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
“do you practically have to be connected to the net with a mac”
not sure what you mean by that michael, but any computer without the internet is broken in my experience :)
July 21st, 2008 at 2:27 am
My PC is for image editing and the occasional SoF II, so I don’t really need to be on the net. i do that at work :)
July 25th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Vista works fine for me on a 1.8 Ghz dual-core laptop with 2 GB of ram and a 2 GB SD card setup to use readyboost. It definitely does not run well with less than 2 GB. Also, if I take out the readyboost card, it does feel a little sluggish.
If you ever reinstall Vista on a machine, try plugging in a 2 to 4 GB USB key and enable readyboost on it. I think you will be surprised at the difference that it makes.
That said, the next laptop I get will have at least 4 GB of ram and hopefully a solid state drive.
As far as OSX or Vista being more sluggish…on identical hardware, it really depends what type of programs you are running as Unix and Win32 have fairly large differences in the way that they handle threads.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I finally decided to byte the bullet and try Sp1. Now the system doesn’t boot at all. Black screen pauses forever. I could have bought a mac but thought vista would have been a close substitute. Wonder if class action would get MS back on track