The worst thing “You left your laptop for a while so I downloaded (yet another) update and restarted the PC. Oh, you were working on it and you’ve lost your work, or what you were doing? Sorry. Tough”.

Second worst thing: switch it on and it immediately tells you to reboot. What kind of machine tells you to switch it off again, the moment you switch it on?

Microsoft need to learn, we DON’T CARE about the o/s. I don’t care about 6 trillion popups, endless patches, endless restarts. I want to switch my pc on and start working on it. When I’m done I want to switch it off. End of.

Bill Gates and his minions must die

I’m a programmer and IT engineer and been to IT industry for 7 years now. I have vista on my laptop (which came with it by default). Although i cannot say that i experience often crashes with this OS, it indeed behaves weird form time to time.
1) fresh XP SP2 installation (without drivers, any kind of software etc.) takes about 3.5GB, can be installed to P2 64MB RAM PC and has 27 PROCESSES (this can be cut down to 20 after a bit of tweaking) running. Dunno vista’s minimum allowable PC configuration, but fresh installation uses 16GB of disk space and in my case had 73 PROCESSES running!! (aero was disabled). Dunno if vista and XP count the amount of the running processes differently, but the fact stays – vista was running three times more processes. By tweaking this number was reduced to 40, but a lot of shit of unknown functionality remained active.

2)boot time in my case is not bad at all. After removing a lot of useless shit from auto startup vista boots faster than my XP SP2, but definitely slower then XP updated to SP3. After boot, vista works slower in all modes and with pretty much all tasks. Maybe process priority management is not good

3)HDD operations are buggy and are VERY slow in vista. winrar hangs during moving decompressed files from temporary folders to destination folder regulary.

4)I’ve never been able to get network services work properly. I have to access other computers in my home LAN only by typing their IP adresses in the “run program” utility. Network printers and getting them working is the whole mysterious saga

5)laptop power management is a joke and its settings are even more of a joke. Those are not great in XP, but definitely better than in vista

6)i like the idea of putting all the settings for one subsystem (e.g. networking subsystem) to a one single place. But I hate the realization of this concept in vista. Plenty of “control centers” is not helping and is not making system management simpler and faster. XP has two main utlilities – control panel and MMC for advanced users. In vista i have to deal with control centers, that are integrated into the control panel. I do not see any reason for introducing this additional level of control utilities. For example, network control center is a nightmare.

7)user profile management sucks big time in vista

I’m going to give a 2008 longhorn server a go. The last 2003 server was great and I’m looking forward to try newer and improved version. Hope its management and usage is not similar to vista. Usually, windows servers are much more stable and controllable than their “user” products, and with a bit of tuning they can also be used on home PC’s without any troubles

As a long time Mac user I decided to get a shiny new Vaio with vista for its blu ray option, thinking I would just use the machine to play dvds and browse the net.

Hey, it plays blu ray just fine (after a ridiculous amount of fiddling) but the sound keeps going on and off for everything else. One day I’ve got computer sound, the next day I don’t.

I don’t have enough time left in my life to devote to this unbelievable wreak of an operating system. S I just have this delightful portable blu ray player, just as I had originally intended. I had hoped to get a functional computer along with it, but, c’est la vie. At least according to MS.