The Trouble With Vista - Laying out the Problems
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So, what is wrong with Vista?
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.
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