http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070422083715451

And lo and behold, the Vista desktop shows up in a minute and a half. But alas, not in a functional state. It takes over two more minutes before the hard disk stops rattling and the machine becomes fully responsive. So nearly four minutes in all. This is a pretty sad figure, especially when compared to the 55 seconds Mandriva Linux 2007 takes on my Toshiba laptop. And I can’t really see the “Wow” factor either. In fact, I find the transparency effects both ugly and annoying. Especially window title bars are no longer well-defined, and appear to be infected with some sort of mold. But OK, there’s no accounting for taste, and no doubt it can be switched off — and I’m actually thankful for the absence of any 3D “special effects”, which I find even more distracting and annoying. An OS and user interface should behave like the perfect butler: make your life as easy as possible while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. Vista behaves more like a very stupid servant in a flashy outfit. It makes its presence felt throughout, raises the alarm every so often without any real need, gets confused easily, drops the dishes on a regular basis, and while appearing to be easygoing and helpful, drives its employer insane with its unpredictable whims and intrusive behavior.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/14/pricey_beta_bugger/

The stand-alone version of Vista Ultimate retails for €600, or $780 here in Ireland. Amazon.com is selling this $780 version to Americans for $380. Or, to put it another way, Europeans are subsidising Americans by $400 on every copy they buy. (…) Indeed, Aero looks nearly as good as KDE, although it demands about three times the system resources. (…) Now for the fun part. The trouble with Vista starts before you get the software home. It’s very difficult to know which edition is right for you, because there are many options, and MS has done a spectacularly bad job of communicating with the public. As I reported previously, I bought the Home Premium upgrade, which, according to the package, can be used on the following Windows OS’s: “Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, or Windows Vista.” I had Windows XP Pro, and yet was not permitted to perform an upgrade – because it would have been a downgrade: I would have lost the use of a few XP features that I never use anyway. So instead of warning me of the features I would lose and asking me if I wanted to upgrade/downgrade anyway, I was offered only the choice of doing a clean install and losing all of my data and settings, and the aforementioned XP Pro features, in one go. Brilliant. (…) Now for another little irritant: immortal craplets. There are two. One is the Vista Security Centre. I have disabled it. I have shut it off in Services. I have tried to shut it off in Msconfig. It won’t die. Every time I boot, the craplet pops up and demands to be enabled. But if it really is disabled, then why am I seeing the bloody thing? And there’s another immortal craplet: one that tells you that you’ve “disabled important startup programs”, like the Security Centre, for example. I’ve tried to kill this ridiculous thing too, with no joy. So, one craplet pops up demanding to be enabled; you exit that, and a different one pops up telling you that you really ought not to have done that. Now, my definition of malware is pretty straightforward: malware is any code that causes my computer to behave in a way I don’t intend, or any code that prevents my computer from behaving in a way that I do intend. Thus the Vista Security Centre is, quite simply, malware. I won’t put up with this nonsense any longer than I’ll put up with a dysfunctional audio system, or a noisy fan that never shuts up for one second. And how about a few decent utilities? Yes, thank you for the DVD burner and thank you for the screenshot tool, and for the very basic photo and movie editing kit. But how about a decent text editor, for God’s sake? Would it be so difficult to give it a little of the magic that Kwrite has got? A spell checker perhaps? The ability to clean spaces? A little colour-coded action for us HTML homebrewers, so we can see simple typos, like forgetting to close a tag? Is that too much to ask? (…) And there’s more. Little things, really. Firefox is unable to make itself the default browser; my SSH client from Anonymizer won’t install; my attempts to apply security patches to Word 2000 fail (“the requested operation requires elevation”); the logout screen now has so many options it needs a pull-down menu, and it defaults to “sleep” when “restart” is the action which users know is the most common, most important – indeed, most therapeutic – one they can take on a Windows box.”

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937793.aspx

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