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I Hate Vista

If you’re about to buy a new computer pre-installed with that virus called Vista, here’s some friendly advice: don’t.

XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista. [New York Times]

The really interesting part of this story isn’t that these users had problems, it’s who the users are and how we learned about them.

For the last three months, I’ve been fighting the temptation to reinstall Windows XP as my OS, but the boys at Best Buy say I’d actually have to pay for an upgrade(!) to do it.

I hate Vista. I hate its naggy pop-up windows, I hate the excessive RAM it requires, I hate the way flash programs stick in its gears, I hate its dysfunctional updates. Shall I go on? I shant. Just avoid Vista like you’d avoid the discharge from an open sore on Amy Winehouse.

The combined love and craftsmanship in the every copy of Windows Vista sold in 2007 would roughly equal that put into one toddler’s Play-Doh snake. Here was a program with several features, such as a warning box that pops up every five minutes or so to ask you if you’re sure you want to do what you’re doing, so shamelessly broken that they seemed to have been added on a drunken dare.

Nearly everyone hated Vista, in the way that nearly everyone hates being stabbed. It didn’t matter. About 100 million copies of Windows Vista were sold in 2007, because 90 percent of the PCs for sale were already infected with it. Want a new computer? Want to be able to buy software for it? Well, then you don’t have a choice. [Cracked.com]

Really, if I had it all to do over again, I might have switched to a Mac.

12 Responses

  1. Vista is horrible. Every single application that I run on my new Vista laptop–including Internet Explorer and other pre-installed bloatare–crashes regularly and at random. At times, it won’t even boot up correctly and to get it to reboot, I have to take out the battery. It’s that bad.

    My next computer will be a Mac.

  2. I recently got a new desktop PC with Vista. Initially I was frustrated about a few (ok, several) settings, but have figured out most of those.

    Aside from three or four programs not working, things are fine. With one exception (CAC reader) Every piece of hardware I plug-in just works. Still, I may install a dual boot with XP (or a triple boot with Linux) to use those 3-4 programs, as well as visit a certain website that must be used with IE6, which can’t be installed in Vista.

    Aside from the media center functions, Vista doesn’t do anything that XP won’t, at least not that I need. A service pack might help.

  3. People I know using Vista are complaining that when you use the IME to input Japanese, the blasted OS decides that you must be using a JIS keyboard and moves the @ and ” and so on all around the place. Is there a Korean-standard keyboard layout that gets forced on you, even with a US keyboard attached, I wonder?

  6. I hate Vista so much. I got a free replacement computer from Dell when mine caught fire, the caveat was it came with vista.
    There are so many things I despise about Vista, where to begin?
    The email. Everything they did to it.
    I use multiple ids and I’m screwed now. It is ridiculously stupid.
    Next I discovered if you get an email address wrong, it takes 29 attempted sends before it corrects and gets rid of it.
    WTF is that?
    You actually have to go into the registry to fix a bad email address!!
    Gee Microsoft, you force feed the world your crappy system, then you get everyone fricking trained and then you decide to change everything.
    I hate hate hate this entire Vista!

  7. I have two new computers…HPs and I detest Vista. the worst thing is that I have no choice in what I buy. The hidden cost of Microsoft and the monopoly is distastfull.
    I have also a eee-pc with Linux and it is delightfull. fast, easy to use and no bloatware.

  8. Switch to the mac guys, you’ll understand why we love our macs. Oh and get XP if you can

  9. I have used Vista for a year now and can honestly say that I hate everything about it. The overdone graphics and transitions. The way is sucks the life out of any computer processor. The way it sucks up all the RAM and HD space. The NAG SCREENS make me want to smash the computer. The security features are annoying and useless. No network browser. The way it tries to automatically search and do other tasks. I HATE THIS GARBAGE. I’ve downgraded to TinyXP with SP3 and love it.
    http://www.WebLite.org

  10. it’s so interesting how all you vista haters, like me……are all making it sound like you have no choice.

    you do have a choice. no one is forcing you to use vista, unless it’s a company computer.

    change.

    at least you have an option to change.

    yeah, it sucks that you’ll have to do some sort of major backup, deal with incompatible programs, etc., yada, yada…..

    life sometimes give you lemons (i.e. vista). but move on. i’m sure it’s certainly a minor bump in the road.

    people in the gulags in NK have no choice. they cannot change.

  11. I totally agree with the disgruntlement expressed about VISTA. To be asked several times if I want to proceed with an action that I initiated irritates every time it happens! It is slow! Despite adding extra memory to my laptop everything could still be done faster by a snail. I am always left speechless when an “open folder” action is followed by this great delay while VISTA populates the list representing the contents of the folder. And then, add to that, every so often you seek to do something with your computer, its settings or programs and get a Windows response “you dont have the security permission to carry out that action”. I’m continually surprised that nowhere in the world has someone tried to take a case court arguing that they have been sold a defective product or a product which not up to the task it is described to do in terms of commercial consumer protection law.

  12. I also hate everything about this bloated piece of garbage – I inherited a powerfull desktop with vista on it and it is slower than my old laptop which has XP. It takes 2.5 hours to copy files that my laptop does in 28 mins. I am going to UPGRADE to XP.