So, I bought a laptop Saturday, and while I wasn’t particularly jonesin’ for it, I got my first taste of Microsoft Windows Vista in its “Home Premium” flavor. (What exactly is “premium” about this “home” experience? I’m still trying to figure that one out. Will the laptop not get good mileage on regular or midgrade or something?) Now, I’m not generally an early adopter when it comes to tech stuff, and doubly so when it comes to Microsoft operating systems, but the tremendous marketing push that the Big Redmond has put on has made it virtually impossible to be able to walk out of the store with what you actually want these days. *sigh*
Anyhow, enough griping about marketing, right? Let’s get down to brass tacks.
- First off, the desktop and stuff looks nice. I guess. I’m still tossing the look around in my head, but just the fact that the first thing I did wasn’t immediately turn on the “Windows Classic” desktop theme, that’s gotta count for something, right? Right? Okay. Damning with faint praise, indeed.
- My machine didn’t come as loaded with useless software as most computers that I’ve purchased from big box stores have come with in the past. Jeez, they still make Microsoft Works? Who knew? Well, they do, and it was removed first thing, along with a few other things that if I didn’t already have solutions for probably would have stayed on. Imagine that! Good thing, too, that there wasn’t a ton to take off, because…
- … the default security settings for this thing make this the most NEEDLESSLY ANNOYING OS I’ve ever dealt with. Wanna create some new menus on your Start menu for all your users? Get ready to affirm your choices as many as four times. Four! To quote the ever-sage Phife from A Tribe Called Quest from a song on their definitive magnum opus, The Low End Theory, “What kind of crap is that? Yo, how’s about a smack” for our favorite programmers. Haven’t gotten around to turning these settings off, but I’m sure I’ll take care of that when I get the chance. That Mac commercial was right on the money on this part.
- This may be a holdover from XP Home (which I’ve never had any prolonged experience with), but what’s with not letting me join my laptop to my domain? Or at least it isn’t apparent how you would go about this. (I sometimes get the feeling that Microsoft programmers get a sadistic kick out of seeing us poor users flop around like dead fish while trying to find some function whose position we had finally gotten used to in a new system, where they’ve buried said function five menus down and on the other side of the screen.) Though this one is understandable — hey, most people ostensibly don’t run server products at home, and hence don’t have an immediate need for anything more than workgroups — at least they could have thought of us poor slobs who sometimes take our personal laptops to work with us. Jeez.
All that said, I’m still willing to give Vista a chance — read a good article on gamespot.com about some of the possibilites of DirectX 10 — I’ll likely be upgrading to at least Business (and probably Ultimate) at some point. Which, I guess is exactly what Microsoft wants me to do. *sigh* It all gets back to marketing in the end, it seems.