Vista: Don't Go There

Well, my Lenovo T61 arrived just in time for my trip. Everything is as promised, so I have to say Lenovo came through. However, Microsoft did not.

Vista Business was preloaded on the machine. I thought, maybe if the vendor had it preloaded with the options preconfigured, it wouldn't be so bad as Vista is reputed. Well, it was so bad, and worse.

From a usability perspective, Vista Business fails.

Vista is substantially slower to respond to user commands -- mouse clicks, movements, and command line requests. This is possibly due to the security features, but two to three second pauses on brand-spanking new hardware is simply unacceptable.

A big difficulty I had was with the combination of Vista Business with Symantec Internet Security Suite. It was well-nigh impossible to connect to my wireless network and exchange files with my older XP-based laptop. I searched for settings that might affect wireless connectivity, firewall, file system permissions... it is a rats nest of settings strewn throughout application panels, OS properties dialogs, and control panel settings... from a users' perspective there is no clear hierarchy of authority, no way to get Vista to respond correctly.

The "User Account Control" dialog opens after every application launch. Yes, I know there is a way to turn this off, but it isn't well-known and certainly isn't obvious. Besides which, unlike many good firewall programs, Vista neither remembers previous answers no offers to remember them. Adding insult to injury, often the dialog will open under an application window or minimized to the icon bar, leaving one to wonder why isn't my application responding? The delay can also cause some applications to time out, forcing the user to restart whatever it was they were doing.

The desktop migration software for Vista was unusable... it acted as if it was making a connection but never progressed. No warnings about connectivity, no recommendations about what steps to take for resolving the issue, nothing. After futzing around with the settings and turning as many of them off as possible, I finally wired up both computers and got them to see each other... sometimes. However, I decided that if my old XP system had a cruddy registry, migrating application settings might not be a good idea. So I just transferred data files and app install zips.

With Symantec installed, the system was unbearably slow to start up and shut down. A six minute wait time for a shut down is completely unreasonable!!! Uninstalling Symantec Internet Security solved much of the the startup and runtime slowness, but the shutdown times were still excessive, on the order of five minutes.

Twice, I got a blue screen error saying that wireless devices were not present. Wait a minute: this is a NEW machine. One of those times I shut off the wireless radio using the switch on the front of the machine during the 5 minute+ shudown. Are the drivers for Vista so poorly written that that they cannot deal with a powerdown condition during shutdown, or is the fault with Vista itself? Either way I should not be getting a blue screen with a new machine.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I don't need these hassles. I need an OS that is at least barely usable, so I'm dumping Vista and reloading my Lenovo with XP.