Facing the full horror of Windows Vista

By Angus Kidman
Monday, 14 May 2007 20:04

Opinion and Analysis

So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we've found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we'd never moved.


We should point out at the start that we migrated to Windows Vista under supposedly optimal circumstances. We waited for a few weeks before even thinking about it, so that we'd avoid any early release showstopper bugs. We purchased a machine from a prominent manufacturer (Lenovo) with Vista pre-installed, so we could avoid the upgrade nightmares that have plagued everyone else we know who's been forced to shift to Vista. (OK, that's not entirely true; a handful of Microsoft employees have told us their Vista migration was trouble-free. You can decide for yourself how valid that testimony is.) And we've deliberately kept the installed software on the machine to a minimum, to minimise the chance of an incompatible application blowout.

We're writing this article on the Vista machine, so a bare minimum of functionality has, arguably, been achieved. But that is, quite literally, the nicest thing we can say about Microsoft's newest operating system.

For starters, it's hideously slow -- notably slower than our previous machine, despite the fact that the new model has twice as much memory and a much faster processor. This isn't just delays caused by the User Account Control system, annoying as it is; even basic tasks like opening documents and launching applications are notably slower.

We'd hoped that our new system would boot faster than its predecessor, but in fact it takes even longer, whether or not it manages to connect to any networks. Applications are also crashing more often than on our XP machine, and Office 2007 -- supposedly a flagship application for Vista -- is the most frequent culprit.

The lack of anything approaching basic network functionality is our biggest complaint. We've written before about how direct Ethernet networking caused the machine to crash unpredictably. We've since discovered that Vista is incapable of communicating with one of our Linksys wireless routers, even though the model in question is certified to work on Vista and chats quite happily to numerous other machines.

Multiple phone calls and emails to Microsoft support (which we wouldn't even be entitled to if we weren't in the media) have so far failed to resolve the problem in a satisfactory way. We'll give credit to Microsoft support for trying hard, but if you can't get basic IP working in 2007, something pretty fundamental is going wrong.

Read on to discover more flaws in Vista, including IE woes and why the Vista certification for hardware manufacturers is meaningless.