The Trouble With Vista - Complexity, Clunkiness, and Consistency
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2. Inconsistent folder view behavior
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.
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