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.