Joel Spolsky also has issues with Vista. Hilariously (or tragically, depending on your perspective), he also had trouble even opening up the friggin’ box. That’s a HUGE miss, as he mentions.
Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve – Joel on Software
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I’m in downtown Atlanta in the waiting room at Emory Hospital, waiting for my wife to come out of Lasik surgery. Happy to discover they’ve got wifi here, not happy to discover that the Terms of Use page is a big image of the legalese. Not only is it inaccessible with screen readers and simple assistive tech like text resizing…it’s also damn hard to read for someone like me who’s 20/20.
What a shame. You’d think that hospitals and universities, two organizations used to accommodating people with disabilities, would know enough to make their site accessible.
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This is a few weeks old, but I did want to point to this article. It reviews a number of “web tops”, or web-based desktops. Calling them web OS’s is a bit grandiose, but if you accept for the moment the idea that to many people, the desktop *is* the OS, then you can get by this bit of semantic overreach.
What still consistently amazes me is that so many offerings simply recreate the tired old desktop/file/folder (and now “widget”) design. Some do it better than others, but it seems like everyone is stuck in this metaphor. What happened to 3D spaces where you could organize your “stuff” in nooks and crannies? What about more integrated views of people’s frequently used data?
Web As Desktop: 20 Web operating systems reviewed – Lifehacker
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I walked by this fax machine for a year before I realized that it had a gunky, peeling sticker on it that displayed the phone number associated with the machine.
There really should be a place on the unit itself to indicate the phone number. Not a big problem, but still.
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Yesterday a co-worker showed me this system function diagram for an in-dash navigation system. I just had to take a picture of it.
It’s from the owner’s manual for his new Honda Ridgeline SUV. It’s darn interesting, I’ll say that. I’ve never encountered system documentation like this.
I’m on the fence as to its usefulness. But I could stare at it all day; it’s just hypnotic. What do y’all think of it? (Be sure to click on the picture to see it full-sized.)
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Let me start this post by getting a few things out of the way:
I say this because I’m about to slag on Windows Vista, and I want it understood that I am not a reflexive MS-basher. I’m not a Mac or Linux fanboy, either (although I regularly use OS X).
A few weeks ago I decided to load Vista on my 4-month old Dell Inspiron 640m. It’s got a Core 2 Duo proc (the T2050 @ 1.6GHz), 1 gig of RAM, and a 120GB HDD. The graphics adapter is the ever-popular Intel 950GM.
Having learned my lesson about upgrade vs. clean install back in the Win98 days, I wiped the HDD and installed Vista. My troubles started as soon as I started playing around with the OS. You know that User Account Control “feature” that everyone’s talking about? It’s a major PITA. Vista was constantly asking me for confirmations, to the point where I simply started automatically confirming whatever it asked.
I’m a fairly sophisticated user and I take care to run firewall software that monitors inbound AND outbound communications, as well as keeps tabs on applications’ behaviors (such as when apps are requesting access to OS resources or services). So I shut off UAC.
Well, it turns out that certain applications won’t install correctly unless UAC is enabled. I’m not talking about obscure apps; I’m talking about things like Adobe Reader. I found myself enabling and disabling UAC ad nauseum as I installed and configured my applications.
My next problem occurred when I wanted to ensure that my command-line based backup process would work with Vista. A while back I bought a fantastic little network-attached storage drive from SimpleTech, which I highly recommend. I use the XCOPY32 command in a batch file along with Window’s built-in scheduler to ensure that my and my wife’s files are backed up regularly to the NAS drive. (And to several other portable drives as well; I like redundancy.) It’s a very simple-to-use and dependable little process. Or it was, anyway, until Vista entered the picture.
After migrating my data back to the laptop, I tested the command-line backup file. I figured better safe than sorry. I honestly expected it to just work. I ensured that the NAS drive was mapped to a drive letter, changed the data paths to reflect the new default locations for Vista user data, and ran the file.
Vista barfed. It thought my NAS drive was full and would not write to the drive. But my wife’s Windows XP machine (correctly) saw the NAS drive as having 145GB free, and had no problems backing up to this drive.
So, Vista had two strikes at this point. The 3rd strike was stability and performance.
Soon after loading the rest of my standard apps (Office 2003, Visio 2003, Nero 7, Flock, Firefox, Quicken 2007), I noticed that Vista was often unresponsive for seconds at a time. This happened A LOT. It didn’t matter what I was doing; at random times the “wait” cursor would spin for 5-15 seconds. Most of the time this would be the cue for the laptop’s cooling fan to engage. (And it usually stayed on for 20 or 30 minutes once it started.) The unresponsiveness and “hanging” behavior was especially pronounced when Outlook 2003 was launched. When this happened I basically couldn’t use Outlook at all.
At times it was so bad I found myself taking the PowerBook out of sleep and sneaking a look at my emails via the webmail interface while Outlook and Vista churned and churned…and when Outlook finally came back, I responded to my mail using the Outlook email composer.
So let’s review: UAC was annoying me to no end. My simple-as-dirt backup system failed under Vista. The system was unresponsive and “hang-y”. And Vista was making my normally-silent-and-cool laptop’s fan spin constantly.
After about 4 days of putting up with this, I decided enough was enough and scrubbed the unit down to bare metal, then reinstalled the XP image I had made shortly before “upgrading” to Vista.
To console myself, I loaded the subtle and attractive Royale Noir XP theme and used an old MS Powertoy freebie to switch the desktop wallpaper every 15 minutes. (I have amassed a huge collection of landscape pix and Hubble shots over the years, so the wallpaper switcher puts them to good use.)
I’m done with Vista for the foreseeable future. With a rock-solid XP SP2 install, an attractive theme, and the wallpaper switcher, I have all my needs met – my computing environment is stable and predictable, the system is responsive, the visual appearance is attractive, and the overall user experience is pleasurable.
I suspect many other people have had a similar experience with Vista.
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