Discussion on:

Top 10 Windows Vista annoyances

I installed Vista as soon they gave it to me for testing and in
matter of a week I was back on XP professional.

I will not install Vista neither on my personal computer nor
on any of the 100 computers on my company.

they are not only annoying but frustrating. i used to be a fun for Vista in it beta releases since August 2006.

it somehow did the trick of stabblizing my bumpy HP nx9010 with 1GB RAM and 80Gb hdd. before it, it was hanging once every week.

after upgrading to final product, i now wish i to ask for a refund. THE "THING" DOES NOT WORK. copying 10mb file takes ages, my quickbooks 2002/2003 does not function properly and a lot more.

i have come to a conclusion, in Africa, where computer hardware is still out of rich to the majority, Windows Vista is an OS for 2010.

get me right, i applaude the effort those guys put in Vista but it power hungry for hardware makes it a wilwish to many people.

i now recommend to my clients the 2 gb ram as the bear minimum otherwise you will not enjoy the experience.

out there in my country, Botswana, there hundreds of users that will find it difficult to upgrade, let alone purchase 2 gb ram PC.

i admire Vista but for the now, it is a no go area.

"In all fairness, it is the responsibility of the software vendors to provide support for Vista?not vice versa."

I disagree. The main function of an OS is to run apps. Any new OS should be able to run software that was written for the last two versions, at a minimum. I've got stuff to do besides play with a pretty new interface.

In fairness, almost every application runs on Vista unless it's something like QuickBooks 2006 or before which was never certified to even run on Windows 2000 or XP. Intuit was forced to stop their nasty coding habbit for Vista and this will help all of us in the long wrong. Vista tries its best to maintain backward compatibility but things that endanger us to malware should be broken.

Antivirus, cd burning programs, music programs, graphic
applications, netwoik management programs, application
and programing apps.

Man there are way to many that don't work, and you have to
bye the next version

A lot of them do work, they just warn you they don't to get more money. Take Nero burning rom for example. I got version 6.x working just fine just by ignoring the warning. It's funny how they always warn you it doesn't work and then forward you to their shopping page.

There are free Antivirus apps like AVG which runs much faster than other AV applications and I recommend AVG. It's fast and free, can't complain about that.

I used Group Policy to do my network management.

Not everything works, but most things do work. Some things you'll have to update, but you have to upgrade at some point. If you're the kind of person that never upgrades anything, then stick with what you have. But at some point, most people have to upgrade. The last version of Windows lasted 6 years with a free upgrade to XP SP2. At some point Microsoft has to charge for a new OS to stay in business.

George, I've seen posts about at least two dozen programs that have been problems. I'm not the guy who has to install and keep the OS running. I'm the guy who has to have certain apps working to get his job done. How pretty the screen is means nothing.

I'm talking percentage wise. It's not right to claim *most* don't work. That's a blatently false statement.

I looked back over the postings and couldn't find anyone who said "most" apps don't work. My point is that you've already paid for an app, maybe as recently as a month ago, and now you have to upgrade? Do you know of any other business where this would be acceptable?

Why would you get a new program and not consider the fact that you would be upgrading to a new OS?

Quote:
"In fairness, almost every application runs on Vista"
Unquote

In fairness now, be objective

The only application that has given me the "Quack Of Death" is a game called Word Zen. It installs fine, but when you run it, the first thing that happens is Vista says "This Program Has Stopped Working". Funny thing, works like a charm on XP (the long blank screen is my KVM switch).

Programs I had to replace with new versions to obtain functionality with Vista Ultimate x64 on new laptop with 2 gigs ram, tl-60 cpu, 160 gig Sata 150 HD, make/model: HP Pavillion/dv9225us (made for Vista):

O&O Defrag, Vista Manager, Tweaknow Powerpack, Paragon Drive Backup server, SecureCrt, WinSPC, & VNC Viewer.

Tools lost or that have reduced functionality: Visual Studio 2005 (Team even with vista updates [reduced to using Visual Studio 2007 Beta]), PowerISO - while waiting for Vista release.

Vista, according to the statistics I have read, breaks 50 percent of the current applications.

In general I agree with these comments, but some are not correct. McAfee Anti-Virus 8.5.i works with Vista. Office 2003 and Office 2007 work fine on Vista. I have not tried Office 2k and I don't expect vista to support it (software has to die at some point). I agree that some of the control panel changes are annoying, but use the classic control panel and it really isn't that different. UAC will always be annoying, but that can be shut off. One thing that I believe should be on this list are Vista's new memory management model seems to really slow some applications down along with general system performace. Even with 2GB of Ram, the system gobbles RAM, caching the majority of RAM instead of leaving it free.

Change is inevitable and that is how all of the software and hardware vendors make money. If things did not change then no one would buy new computers or software and that would put a lot of people out of work. Not a good thing! If you don?t like change or like to learn new things, I suggest you find a new line of work.

I for one don?t find UAC very annoying. It is only one or two clicks. If you can?t handle moving the mouse that far how do you even get out of bed. I wish us ?techs? would stop telling people to turn it off. It is meant to be a good thing and if people will leave it on we will soon find out if it is worth it or not.

Instead of griping about Windows Vista shouldn?t we be looking for answers and helping each other out on these issues or maybe sending Microsoft and other software vendors our constructive criticisms?

I have found that Vista is very slow at starting up and shutting down and extremely slow copying large chucks of data. Is it just me or is anyone else experiencing this. I have found myself going back to using the command line utility xcopy to copy because it is much faster.

Hi jmoddy,

I too am having the same issue with copying large chunks of files over the network. Vista is extremely slow at this and that calculating feature makes things slower as well.

There are a lot of forums out there complaining about the time vista takes to copy large chunks of data over the network.

But a resolution for this I have not seen as of yet.

I 've recently noticed another huge problem. Blue Screens. Not sure what the hell MS is thinking but they stuck us IT guys out in the cold. Has anyone got a BSOD yet. I have more than a few times. The problem with the blue screen is they went from gving us error codes to now it's just a blank blue screen. How do I troubleshoot a BSOD now? It was hard enough with error codes. Bring back the error codes!!! That is a huge blunder by MS.

I had a PC crash. No choice had to get Vista. There is supposed to be methods to install software as emulating XP Pro Svc2. Every piece of software loaded failed. I even loaded VS 2005 Express thinking maybe the patches would work there. After 35 days the box was in for service warranty due to around 140 reported errors. I got the box back. I won't load a piece of software into it as I have already seen other OS hangs. The OS does not support Email that is web based. I will never down load my email into this OS since it crashed out in 30 days, got it back and still finding other pieces of crap in it. I would loose my entire history of email in a box that is not at all useful. I have not had 1 piece of software work in it yet. All USB printers have failed. No software I own runs on it. I will not buy any more just to have a useful something run on this box. Dual Booting a MAC sounds like a better way to go...

Vista does support web based Email, else I am better with a new OS than I believed. I have no problem reaching my university based Exchange server, nor my hotmail account.

I do agree that Vista is a challenge, but not the way you think it is. I have had to reload the OS with applications for backup images 6 times. Mostly this occurs from my misunderstanding of what are junk files or registry entries where I crash the OS by applying XP hacks that fail. Twice I had to re-image the drive before I discovered that a new box had a bad BIOS, and this would crash anything. The OS has some problems but in time when programmers learn the particularities of Vista, the problems will be corrected.

The OS does not support it as a default application link. In XP I can select if I want to use Outlook or another application or to have the OS configure to your web based email as the default email account so that when you click an icon to send to email as attached or ... too it does start the email account or software of my choice. What you are doing is going to the web and going to the site of your choice and reading email. That is not what Microsoft is supporting any longer. The OS will not allow you to select the web base site as the email service. I use 5 different web based email sites but I can not do a click with in an application on the "send to" button and start my web based email accounts. That is not supported.

I pay for the email storage on some of my web based accounts so I don't have to download the emails on my pc and then manage both email accounts on the web and the pc. I keep it off the PC also since I have had crashes and lost critical information that was not retrievable off a back up since the back up never took place and the crash did.

Also using the properties selection before installing any software into the Vista to select the emulation operation has been the method I have been using to install software. I selected XP Pro svc2 emulation and the installed software does not operate correctly as it did on XP. 1 example is a laser print install will never do a test page print no matter what I do. So that is yet another glitch in the OS, it does not emulate correctly. Additional to that is the PC went in for a complete check up and rebuild as the OS locked the box. (back to the OEM Mfg) I got it back and some of the same errors continued to happen. I had 33 errors on the original build to do a back up on the OS - that is the Master disks before the crash. After the crash I had 20 more crashes and I still do not have a viable back up that I can restore, rebuild or recover the OS from. It also still hangs and basically stops operating till when ever it decides to say OK I am ready now to try and do something new. The Tech people of the box build (mfg) say it is in the OS that is where the problems are.

Also I wish you would have spent the hours online dealing with these issues of this faulty and failing OS because the stability of it is not there from the get go on a NEW box. And that is not forgetting the call time on the phone with people they hire as speaking english but I can't understand as a born american with and IQ of greater then 170...

You have a crappy machine, take it back. If you are having this trouble on all machines with Vista, stop messing with Vista then and go back to your Mac. People have different experiences with different things. This crappy experience you are having doesn't mean the OS is bad. I've had no problems getting almost everything that I through at it to work (old usb printer, older software, etc...). The only thing I can't get to work is an old Pocket PC 2002 PDA.

Before you reply and flame me, understand that I may not know what I'm talking about because what do I know, my IQ's only 150.

You are kidding right! It is closed-source and proprietary. No elite programmer will mess with the junk!

Anyone on this site should know how to put together a good computer.And install xp with no problem.that would give you time for windows v to get there crap together.I built one with no computer training.and it runs perfect.if you are an it pro why would you buy some peice of crap from best buy or dell.Hell George ou built one with a pair of linesman plyers.which was the most hillbilly thing I ever saw by the way.so if you guys are really computer pros.throw together an xp box and quit bitching

...install Linux, download VMWare Server 1.01 for free and run WinXP, BSD, and/or Vista as VMs. Something goes snafu? Just revert to the last good snapshot.

I miss using keyboard to shutdown
Unless I'm missing an option somewhere to change it back, the only thing that I'm having a hard time gettin over is hitting the Start key on the keyboard, then "U" to get to shutdown options. Now when you hit the Start key, anything you type goes into the Search box!

Hmmm... UAC - Union Aerospace Corporation. Messed with things they didn't understand and should have left well alone. Nearly brought about the end of humanity.

UAC - User Access Control. Stops users from messing with things they don't understand and should leave well alone... coincidence?

Excellent Review, right on the money. Most of the problems can be overcome, but why?

I'll add: Aeroglass is cool,nice and all that; if Mr Jobs didn't get a cut he should be pissed.

Your happiness is not a primary concern of M$. Think about it. I just hope I live long enough to see them go under.

I think the version of Vista makes a difference as to whether or not a program will run.

The Geek Squad guys at Best Buy screwed up my laptop, they could not repair it and replaced it with a Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista Basic.

All of my old software (including Office 2000), works on it just fine as well as an older version of Adobe Photoshop (Ver 5.5). In fact I've not had any problem with loading any of my older software and getting it to run. There is just one exception, Adobe Acrobat Ver 6 would not install.

1. zomg msconfig, still right where it was and even more useful. Lost points on that one.

2. OMG two more clicks! or... use the card manufacturer's control panel which is generally better for system performance.

3. 'Professional who doesn't use classic mode?

4. System resource and energy management. Look into it, 'it pro'

5. Too many holes here to list. Boils down to you didn't read the manual. I run application from 15 different localizations, many through applocale and have not had a single problem. I also run the full adobe creative suite 3, technical communications suite, maya, rhino, and *shock* autocad. No problems. Look into that little 'run in compatability mode' feature if your 'problems' persist.

6. You want os x pretty on a commodore 64? Sorry, doesn't work that way...

7. That's something the market dictates, and an area you have no experience in, and thus, no right to comment on. Just to note, linux comes in 9000 flavours, as does unix.

8. >_> *Obviously* not a programmer if you don't understand the fundamental security enhancement a stop call and forced manual click bring to an application.

9. Where are you shopping? I could sell it to you at 50% of that and still make 200% profit. Please correct your numbers.

10. I'm sure anything is difficult if you don't read the manual.

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Now for my two questions.

In what world are *you* an it professional, and how can I delete the stargate address?

This is simply a rehash of what every other self-proclaimed pundit has been saying. Some half truths and missing a lot of significant issues. Have you actually used the product or did you research this on Digg? There are plenty of things that could be improved in Vista and you mentioned none of them. Here are a few that you missed -
1. Search doesn't work as expected
It will only search known types
Sometimes it doesn't find things that it should
2. Folders default to the wrong type and they don't stay as set
Can't we have other preset types?
Can they be customizable?
They need to be easier to set
3. Windows Mobile Device Center
Still no Wifi Sync
Maybe they can ask the Zune Team for help
4. Clicking on the wrong spot in the bread crumb trail makes it disappear

Another one for the hit list!
Can anyone explain this?:- The application has failed to start because its side by side configuration is incorrect.Please see application log for more details.
Microsoft and windows have failed to come up with an answer Has anyone?

Top one Million Annoyance FOLDER settings

"Tweak UAC" allows UAC in quiet mode for Admins. Safe but no pop-ups.

Grave digging aside, this article seems whiny when compared to windows 8 annoyances.