Vista sucks
My new laptop arrived today. The Inspiron 640m is a very good laptop, the only thing missing IMO is an integrated webcam. It came with Windows Vista Basic, and get this: Dell had already enable composite support for it! I don’t get any gimmicky desktop effects but I do get hardware acceleration, and that’s what matters.
Now, regarding Vista: it sucks. It is ok-fast alright, and pretty stable and it always does what you ask of it. But it’s annoying and it has a very confusing and bloated UI. While technology-wise it is a step forward for Windows, usability-wise is a step backwards. It just ain’t a simple inteface. There is no freaking way you can easily find where everything is in your computer.
For example, by mistake I deleted the Trash icon from the desktop and to get it back you have to really google it. There is no fucking way you can guess where that option is otherwise. Sure, you can just drag-n-drop a shortcut from Explorer to your desktop, but this is not the same as the original Trash icon which has special right-click options.
The control panel is a mess. IE’s UI sucks. Explorer is confusing.
One other thing, Windows Vista Mail doesn’t support Hotmail anymore. I am a paid Hotmail customer, so I am now expected to use a web browser to access my email. And how do I get all that email to my local email database? There doesn’t seem to be a way!
Now, after it told me that it can’t do Hotmail anymore, I closed down the app. Later, I decided to configure my POP3 instead. And guess what! Now Windows Vista Mail loads completely without giving me a wizard, and I just can’t find where to configure new accounts. There is no such option in its menus! What’s the deal with that? update: Found it. Apparently searching for “mail” in the programs’ search bars loads a specific email message without the rest of the UI instead of loading the full Windows Vista Mail application! What a mess!
The Sidebar is shitty: the weather applet says that it can’t find the server for my locale/language (US/English!) and the RSS applet does not let me change the RSS feeds to something else. What kind of shit is all that?
Having said that I am getting Vista Ultimate. A friend is selling it for $50 (legal copy) so I thought why not. But it will probably just stay in the shelf and it will never be used. Update June 2008: it’s sitting in my shelf never installed for more than a year.
I can’t wait for Ubuntu to get released so I can have a sane UI back. Short of not being able to install Mac OS X that is.