Computersight -

So I bought a laptop at my local BestBuy, and suprise suprise, it came with Microsoft Windows Vista! At first, I figured, it couldn’t be that bad, everyone must just be exaggerating. There is no way that Microsoft would put out a half finished, barely supported OS, right?

Wrong.

I have been using Windows since I started getting into computers as a kid, I cut my teeth on DOS, but moved to Windows 3.1 shortly after. I was with Microsoft through Windows 95, I was there in 98 SE, I remember the Blaster worm, I’ve been an MS user through and through for over 10 years, and not once had I even considered that there was another operating system out there. Sure, I knew that there were other options, but that doesn’t mean I cared about them. I had the almighy, brilliantly supported, GUI driven Windows, why did I need anything else?

And then one day, in the midst of all kinds of success, having a dominating majority of the world’s PC users under their thumb, and being the industry standard, along came a little black sheep named Vista. I don’t know what anyone in Redmond was thinking, but it obviously wasn’t anything to do with using computers, my guess is that they all just sat around drinking cough syrup until the got an idea of what to make this new operating system look like. Vista is an overly bloated, bogged down, under-preforming piece of garbage, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise either hasn’t used Vista for any period of time, or is trying to sell you a copy of Vista. The first thing I noticed was that I had no installation media, no recovery discs, nothing. I checked the box, I looked in the flyer to make sure I didn’t misread anything, but no, I was right. No discs. Hmmm, not a great start here…. Next I booted it up, and after waiting far longer then what I believe is reasonable on 2 gigabytes of memory, I was treated to the shiny new boot procedure, with shiny new boot splash, and shiny new logon screen, and shiny new desktop, sure everything looks shiny, but is that why I just had to wait over 3 minutes to get Vista to fully load from a cold start?

After getting my user account all set up (thankfully, the process wasn’t much different then XP. Much being the key word here.) and getting a couple of basic programs installed (I haven’t used Internet Explorer in years, Firefox all the way for me! The only time I let that infernal browser load is when there is no getting around it.) I took a look at what was on my desktop, first thing that caught my eye was where my missing cds were, and I was not impressed at all to see that they were sitting patiently on my hard disk waiting for me to burn them. What the hell is that!?!? You couldn’t spring the extra couple nickels to give me discs, so I need to buy and burn them myself? Alright fine, I suppose I it could make some small amount of sense, but most definately not from a consumer point of view. The next problem I hit was the size of the Recovery Disc I was about to burn, it was just enough over a single DVD that I needed to use two. But I can’t just use a cd for the extra info, I need to use an entire DVD on less then 500 mb of data, so after a bit of complaing, thats what I did. Next problem came around when I realized what I had just burned… Recovery Discs? I thought I needed an Installation DVD? So a quick round of Googling turns out that I have burned myself a more of less worthless hunk of crap, since any problems I have that require the DVD, Windows simply checks the partition where the recovery media is sitting and uses it instead. Whatever, at least I can recover it should I botch it?

Next step was to load some games and software up, and the first order of business there was the almighty Starcraft. Which didn’t work. Neither did Broodwar, Diablo, Diablo 2, or Warcraft (any of them). Turns out, Microsoft decided to change things around in just such a way that Blizzard games don’t exactly work anymore. So what about something else? I’ll load up Farcry, that is a Microsoft friendly game for sure! Nope, no dice there either. Fine. I’ll just load up Photoshop while I look through my games library and decide what to install. What do you mean Photoshop doesn’t work either?!?

Alright, I gave it enough chance, time to wipe this thing and replace it with a real OS, XP Pro.

In goes the disc, let it reboot and start from the cd, and it starts copying files over to do the install. But lo and behold, when it rebooted into the GUI portion of the install, it couldn’t find any hard drives! Surely Vista couldn’t still be making me miserable without even being booted, right? Wrong again. I spent a couple of months dealing with the awful compatiblilty of Vista, while enjoying some of the errors it churned out like how I should contact all these other software companies that made incompatible software, so upon investigating say, Blizzard’s web site about Vista compatiblity (the link was given to me by Vista itself) only to discover that Blizzard cannot fix this problem, and it will be something that I might find appearing in other programs too. Somewhere in the development of Vista, Microsoft decided to totally and radically change the makeup of the OS, rendering it obsolete before it was even finished. I followed the leads that I gained from Blizzard explaining that MS changed how things run, and many programs must be rewritten to work properly with Vista, and came across another interesting thing, that hard drive problem I had while trying to install XP could be part of this. Turns out, I was right. If you go buy a newer computer, it’ll have a sticker on it somewhere that probably says Designed for Vista, or some crap like that. If you see that logo, find a different machine, MS has remade drivers, and in order for hardware to have maximum compatibiliy with Vista, it needs to have it’s drivers totally rebuilt. Which means to make your life easier, Vista machines only ship with shiny new hardware in them. Sounds cool right? Unless that shiny new hardware isn’t properly supported by XP….

You make me angry Vista, you make me so angry, I’m…. I’m…. I’m gonna find a new OS!!!!

And along came a wonderful thing, the miracle of being pushed that little bit too far and striking back in your own way. I started learning what else was out there, and in doing so, I was exposed to Ubuntu, one of, if not THE best operating system I have ever had the pleasure of using. It has an incredibly easy way to customize it, and you don’t need to worry about messing around with any UX Theme patcher crap, since almost everything in the land of Linux is open source, anyone can modify or add new themes, with little to no technical abiltiy. So I totally converted the entire OS to look completely different. In a matter of minutes too. Ubuntu has a brilliant package management system which frees you from scouring the net in search of the programs, since it has tens of thousands of programs that are maintained and freely available right from your main menu! And the speed! The file systems that Linux uses are just faster the NTFS, hands down. And security wasn’t added as an afterthought either, your install is secure from ground up. Hmm, maybe I should start writing a review of Ubuntu…..

I’ve ranted enough, I think you probably get the point here: Do not get Vista, not for any reason. Even if someone offers you a copy for free, remember: there is a reason its free, do you really want that ugly monster living on your hard drive?