Microsoft’s announcement of the release of Vista in 2007 was, even by the Redmond Giant’s own ground-breaking standards, a hubristic affair. Promises were made of killer features, powerful security and ground-breaking visuals. The hype hit new heights. The operating system has, to put it mildly, not lived up to it. This article is the first part of a two-part series on Microsoft’s widely-publicized problems with Vista.
Contributed by Bruce Coker Rating: / 4 October 21, 2008
By the time Vista finally arrived it was, perhaps inevitably, something of a let down. Not because it was especially terrible - it wasn't. There have, however, been a number of serious and predictable issues. These include the lack of hardware drivers, and the fact that running it at a reasonable speed required hardware capable of controlling a NASA mission to Jupiter.
The main problem with Vista was that, while the bad things were bad - DRM and overzealous security for example - the good things were, simply, a little nondescript. For example, 3D desktops might be good to look at, but not so good that you would fork out for a new PC or put up with working at a crawl just to have them.
Now the dust has had time to settle, the consensus among users is that Vista has not added a great deal of significance to their computing experience, and has come at a heavy price in terms of the restrictions it imposes. And as Dave Winer pointed out in a recent article at scripting.com, "the days of excitement happening in OSes is long past."
The thrust of Winer's article is that Vista seems to be set for dramatic failure, and this may not be as unlikely as it sounds, despite the vast resources Microsoft poured into releasing Vista and then into defending it. Publicity stunts such as the infamous 'Mojave' experiment may not cost the earth, but Jerry Seinfeld doesn't come cheap, and the decision to bring him in to prop up the ailing operating system smacked of a certain degree of desperation: a view supported by the affair ending almost as soon as it had begun.
On top of all this, the message emerging from Redmond seems to indicate the probability of an earlier than expected release date for Windows 7. So has Microsoft decided to throw in the Vista towel, ME style, cut its losses and advance swiftly on to the next version? In this two-part article I'll be taking a look at what is really wrong with Vista, discussing the best solutions to these problems, and wondering just what the future might hold for the beleaguered OS.
While Microsoft is no doubt correct to claim that many of the criticisms that have been leveled at Vista are inaccurate and often perceptual, some of them are in fact very real and are causing genuine difficulties for users. It would also be true to say that Microsoft created a large number of the problems for itself, when the first official Vista release turned out to be barely above Beta standard. Since then the company has been running to catch up, struggling to overcome poor initial publicity and convince users that many of the issues have been fixed in subsequent updates and in Service Pack 1.
However, now that the OS has been in widespread use for well over a year, it is possible to put these issues in some kind of perspective and identify the genuine problems, along with their causes. So here, in no particular order, is our top eight Vista issues, as determined from an unscientific assessment of the complaints that tend to fly around the Internet most frequently.
1. Too much choice
In his keynote speech to the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference back in June 2007, Steve Jobs joked that the Basic version of OS X Leopard would cost $129.99. As would the Premium version, the Business version and the Ultimate version. It might have been a cheap shot, but it's one that continues to strike a chord with many Vista users. When Microsoft announced that it was releasing no fewer than four versions of Vista (more if you count 32 and 64 bit versions), it seemed to illustrate a profound difference between Redmond's concept of an operating system and the view held by the rest of the world. Precisely what parts of the OS, wondered many people, had the company decided its less well-heeled users could do without?
As it turned out, some of the missing pieces in the cheaper versions aren't entirely trivial. The widely unpopular User Account Control (UAC), for example, is more difficult to manage in the Home Basic and Home Premium editions, which are supplied without a local Security Policy editor. In the Business and Ultimate editions it's possible to use the editor interface to disable the annoying, nagging UAC prompts without entirely disabling the other security features of UAC. Home Basic and Home Premium users are given just the option of turning UAC on or off altogether, unless they are prepared to hack the registry. This means that in practice more users of the cheaper versions will simply end up disabling an important security feature of the OS. It's hard not to wonder whether this was what Microsoft really intended.
A similar example is provided by the Previous Versions feature. This maintains "shadow copies" of documents, allowing the user to retrieve earlier drafts in the event of unintentional data loss. All versions of Vista save the shadow copies, but only Business and Ultimate allow them to be retrieved - so if you have either Home Basic or Premium, it is in fact needlessly using up your disk space at absolutely no advantage to you whatsoever. This is more than a disadvantage to users of the lower-priced versions: it's an active penalty. Fortunately, third-party utilities such as Shadow Explorer are available to allow Basic and Premium users to access their Previous Versions.
Vista has an option to define the type of view you require for an individual folder. However, the view type is liable to change when a file of a different type to the one the OS expects is placed in the folder in question. For example, copying an image into a folder set to view in details mode often makes the view type change to large icons. This issue has plagued not just Vista but earlier versions of Windows. It is unfortunate, however, that Microsoft developers have still failed to engage properly with it.
3. Unnecessary complexity
This is a difficult issue to define precisely, since what is unnecessary varies from user to user. However, it is a common complaint that with Vista Microsoft has introduced excessive numbers of additional steps and menus into tasks that were simple to perform in XP. One such is changing the display options. This used to require a simple right-click on the desktop or a left-click on the display icon in the Control Panel. It now requires users to navigate an additional menu - the personalize screen - in order to get to the display settings.
4. Slowness and clunkiness
Vista doesn't seem to be inherently slow - at least not when run on adequately powerful hardware. But apparently simple tasks such as deleting icons or small files seem to take far longer than they should. Users have remarked, for example, that Vista can take several seconds to delete a desktop icon, even displaying a progress bar for this trivial task that should be completed before the OS has had time to invoke one.
5. Aero too demanding
If you have Vista Home Basic edition this won't affect you, but the fact for many users of the more expensive versions of Vista is that the much-trumpeted Aero user interface is too demanding of system resources. This issue shows itself by slowing some systems down to the point of being unusable, even on fast hardware fitted with plenty of RAM. It has been argued that this is a non-issue thanks to the way Vista automatically disables desktop effects whenever a full-screen application is launched. That's all well and good - but what if you prefer your applications to run in windows? Many people have ended up disabling the very interface features that were supposed to make Vista such an improvement over XP, leaving them wondering just what was the point of upgrading in the first place.
6. Dependence on updates and service packs for respectable performance
Throughout the history of the PC, operating systems have been less than perfect at release. Nonetheless, Vista has received an exceptionally high level of criticism for the fact that many things that users should reasonably expect to work out of the box have been broken. Vista has depended even more than XP on updates and service packs to get it working.
Many users have commented with concern about how often Vista appears to access their hard drives. Microsoft have explained this phenomenon as a combination of the SuperFetch, Search Indexer and Disk Defragmenter features.
SuperFetch is designed to speed systems up by using unused RAM as a cache. Vista fills it with data from the most frequently used applications, supposedly anticipating what might be needed in the near future. This results in hard drive activity whenever RAM is available for this purpose.
Search Indexer automatically and continuously monitors user-defined areas of the hard disk for changes to the data. This enables rapid access to commonly used files and applications via the Instant Search box, at the cost of near-continuous hard disk grinding. The problem here is that by default the indexed directories include application-specific folders that change frequently but are of no relevance to the vast majority of users. This is an issue Microsoft could easily have avoided by modifying the default behavior.
Disk Defragmenter is also configured by default to operate automatically to a schedule in the background, resulting in excessive hard disk activity at unexpected times. In fact, when you consider that in the out-of-the-box configuration these three background processes can be in near-continuous competition for access to a system's hard drives, it's amazing that Vista works as well as it does.
8. Freezing photo gallery
One frequent complaint has been that Vista's new Photo Gallery application freezes up from time to time. Photo Gallery is more than a simple image viewer, offering basic and non-destructive editing functions such as red-eye removal and simple histogram adjustments. This extra functionality is welcome, but not at the expense of an image viewer that works.
So that's what's wrong with Vista. Part two of this article will consider what steps users can take to improve the Vista experience, and will go on to consider Microsoft's long-term strategy to deal with the poor reputation of their flagship operating system.
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