Sam Varghese
Monday, 31 December 2007 20:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
How many years does it take to create an operating system that works? How many people does it take to do the work - in other words, how many manhours does this task consume? Would Microsoft like to cast some light on this?
In June, when I
looked at Windows Vista Ultimate , I realised that five years simply wasn't enough for the developers at this great company to produce something that was usable without inconveniencing people.
Having heard recently of the arrival of a service pack - the usual panacea for sick software from Microsoft - I decided to see if an additional year of development had removed some of the rough edges and taken into account some of the myriad complaints made by Vista users since the operating system was launched at the beginning of last year.
I'm using Notepad to write this - yes, painful though it is, I've been using Vista for the last two weeks in order to provide an honest picture of the changes, if any, brought about by this service pack. It has been said that Microsoft normally gets things somewhat right at the third try so I wasn't expecting a great deal. Service pack 2, I believe, will make this beast more palatable to the masses who still continue to cling to Windows.
One thing that keeps happening with Notepad is that every time I save my work the cursor goes all over the place. It rarely stays at the point it was when I hit the Ctrl-S combination. If I'm not careful, then I have to keep carrying out corrections all the time, deleting unnecessary characters and repositioning the cursor before I move along.
Annoying? It's damn annoying, especially for someone like me who uses the two-finger method for typing - which means I have to look at the keyboard all the time. Perhaps all Vista users are expected to be experienced typists - or else maybe this is one way of pushing people to buy a word-processing package called Office. You never know. (I've just switched to WordPad; both these applications lack one simple feature - word count. Ctrl-S still behaves in a funny way - is one meant to only use the mouse?)
I made one change to my PC before I installed Vista this time - I bought 4 GB of memory and installed it. The rest of the hardware is the same as for my eralier test - an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600, an all-in-one motherboard with an nVidia geForce 6100 onboard, a 250-gig Western Digital SATA drive and an LG DVD rewriter.
