I'll cut to the chase on this post: I got Vista, it just plain sucks.

My first complaint: How would you like it if you had friends (or kids, for the older people) and every time you asked/told them to do something, they would say... "I need to confirm that you actually want me to do this. Please say yes if you do." Well, that's how you're gonna feel when you upgrade to Vista. Whenever you want to make a change in any setting, the screen will dim (microsoft wanted the mood to be dramatic and really make you think about what you are doing) and the message will pop up "Windows needs your permission to continue." EVERY SINGLE TIME! This is one of those things where, when I was beta testing windows vista back in the middle of last year, I thought for sure they would get rid of it. But they didn't. It's still in the thing i just spent $250 on.

Next complaint: THEY COPIED MAC OS X. The search, the photo sorting, Windows Mail, the calendar thing, and gadgets... IT WAS ALL seen first on Mac OS X. No surprise, they copied features in many other products besides windows (lets look at Office, their servers, and Xbox 360) but I won't get into that now.

Next complaint: Networking support is weak, overly complex, and not as flexible as what was found in XP service pack 2. For example, I have Comcast Broadband Internet service for my home. So far, setting up that service has been easy, seeing that I have a broadband router. However, Vista didn't like the way my router was set up, even though XP, my PlayStation 3, and even my friend's XBOX 360 had no problems with my router before. But vista did. I had to change a lot of settings to get it to work. On another story, my grandfather does not have a router, he connects his computer directly to his cable modem. Vista wanted him to setup PPPOE with endless settings, usernames, passwords, and other useless crap that Comcast didn't even have in place, just for simplicity of setup. In XP, you could simply plugin the Comcast modem into your Ethernet port, setup a simple IP and service name thing, and you would be done. Just another example of what used to be a simple function turned to Vista hell.

Next: There's basically three ways to do everything, but none of those ways is uncomplicated. It seems like Microsoft's way of making windows more secure is just by making it overly complex, so much that even some of the easiest tasks on XP take 4 times the effort to achieve with Vista. As i mentioned above, with the network problems... there are four COMPLETELY SEPARATE places you can go to in order to change a connection's settings, and most times to change or even open one of those setup windows, the permissions box will bother you again.

Finally: Whoever's idea it was to run an already-unstable operating system using an unstable video technology (directX) should be fired. The Vista UI runs off directX, and the experience has never been more sluggish. I ran vista on a computer I own with 2 GB RAM, a $200 NVIDIA video card (its a good performer, although its not top of the line), and on a DUAL CORE processor. The whole computer with all the other features cost me over $1000, but the performance of Vista? Average. When vista boots, performance, I will admit, is perfect. But, as any longtime windows owner knows: Every minute running makes it slower. By the time a few hours rolled around, the system would sometimes fail with layer processing (that is, the window I was viewing might fall behind other windows and then come back, or sometimes begin to flash and fail to render correctly. And, a typical Internet Explorer failure: I would type an address into the address bar, and it would take one second to draw each letter, until eventually all the letters i had typed 10 to 15 seconds ago were finally in the bar, and I could hit enter.

And that performance was on my middle-end machine. More than half of windows users who would UPGRADE to vista would not have a computer with spec even close to middle-end. Many with very low end. How will windows run there.

Well, that ends the long post. I need to say, I've beta tested and RC-tested (release candidate tested) windows since middle of 2006. I need to say, in the beginning, I was semi-impressed, but once RC2 came around and I realized these problems weren't getting better, i realized that Vista was a problem

Thanks for reading my long post.