The Mailowl Scrolls

On Saturday evening I installed Windows Vista Ultimate (July 2006 CTP, I can’t spare the bandwidth for RC1) and for someone who is easily wowed I have to admit I’m a little disappointed and I’m desperate to get back to Windows XP so that I can work again.

There aren’t even many good points to mention about Vista; it’s pretty responsive, looks nice and Chess Titans rocks; but that’s about it.

I have 3 main gripes (although there are various others) about my installation which I want to share with you. MSN doesn’t work, there is zero support for virtual drives and excessive dialog boxes.

How silly can the first issue be? I know that Vista is a beta product but it’s practically the first communication tool anyone would install; even before email. Initially I thought it was something I had done but this post on the Longhorn Blogs confirmed that Windows Live Messenger can be expected to crash on Vista.

The Second issue will hopefully go away as Vista is launched and third parties create tools for the operating system, but it’s a pain trying to install downloaded software (like Visual C# Express) without it. It’s not like Microsoft gives me the option of burning the ISO’s I download from them to CD with their software anyway.

Just for the record, I’m running Vista x64 but according to this post on Channel9,Virtual Clone will work properly on the x86 version. For those with x64 installations you can use WinRAR can extract ISO images to a folder and run from there.

The last is just annoying; because of the extra security Microsoft now makes doubly sure you want to install anything and even afterwards has more stuff to waste your time with. It’s called User Account Control (thankfully you can turn it off) and the first thing it does when you click on an exe is ask you if you want to allow this application to execute (that’s after Vista has picked up that you’re installing a 32-bit application first and asks you if you’re sure you want to run that). Then you go through all the motions of installing the application until you inevitably get another dialog (sorry, I couldn’t get Cute FTP working on Vista to upload the picture) telling you “This program might not have installed properly”.

Now Coding Horror has a nice post about redundant dialogs because this is a doozy. You’re given the option to “Reinstall using recommended settings”, “This program is installed correctly” and a cancel button. Why have the cancel button if “This program is installed correctly” has the same results, and is it wise to try and get an application running under another configuration if it doesn’t work in my normal environment? You also get this dialog if you cancel your installation which just adds to the confusion.

From desktop icons being 3 times the size that they have to be, to the Windows Explorer which shows you files the way it wants regardless if you set your default view, Vista didn’t give a good first impression for someone who knows what they’re trying to do and the default settings I think will irritate even novice users.