I've seen the Vista - and I don't like it

Next to John Howard and Phillip Ruddock my wife’s greatest hate is technology.  So when we planned to go overseas in March of this year I had to do a fair amount of work to make sure that there were plenty of good reasons for me to sneak a laptop into the luggage.  Communication with the grandchildren was the secret – so I decided to buy a small form factor laptop with a camera built in and plenty of other goodies to make it useful.

I wanted to buy a Sony Vaio but when I called Sony to place an order the woman on reception told me that they were just about to bring out the new greatest and latest but it wouldn’t be available until after I left for Europe.  So I settled on a DELL XPS M1210.  A nice little unit and after using it for a few months there is just one thing that I hate AND THAT’S MICROSOFT VISTA!   When I ordered the system from the folks at DELL they would only supply Vista – if only I had known how bad Vista was I would have bought a MAC and been as happy as Larry.

It’s not that Vista doesn’t look pretty it’s just that so many things don’t work and it takes me twice as long to do anything as it took on Windows XP.  The following are the sorts of troubles that I had:

• I would connect up at the WiFi hotspot and Vista would tell me that I had Local and Internet access but it wouldn’t get me to Google.  I would get mad with the thing and then after five minutes or so Google would pop up and I would wonder why I was so angry, thinking that I had been so ungracious and overly demanding.
• I have a Maxtor network drive at home which I expect is delivered with a Linux operating system and I was pretty chuffed when I got it all set up on the network.  So I planned out a strategy for data storage and made a few decisions which needed some serious movement of directories and files.  Most of the stuff that needed to be moved was on other systems but there was a small amount of files (mainly photos from the holiday that were on the M1210).  So I started to move them to my new drive and WHAT!!  Vista started telling me it was going to take 9 or 10 hours to move a few photos.  Well it didn’t take that long but it certainly was a pretty slow process.  I expect it’s all the Digital Rights Management stuff in there.
• I need to access a number of other systems remotely and in my XP days I would happily use Remote Desktop Connection.  It was nice and quick over the links that I have and it worked like a charm.  So I opened up the RDC on Vista, clicked the button to connect to one of the remote sites and, and, and – nothing much happened.  I am not a dumb user and searched the web for solutions only to find a whole bunch of solutions to a myriad of problems that had been introduced by M$ in RDP 6.0 but nothing that resolved the issue that I have.  I get to some sites and there is a half hearted display of some stuff and then it just craps out telling me the network connection is lost (several times).  When I use another system with XP it connects just fine so I have had to get a second system on my desk just to connect to other sites.
• Apart from a Linux Server (CentOS 4.5) running at home I also have Windows Small Business Server 2003 running (I’m a glutton for punishment).  I connected my nice new DELL M1210 with Vista and joined the Domain.  WHAAATTT – whenever I connect get a message saying that Windows Vista is not compatible with Windows Small Business Server 2003.  Now, come on Bill that’s just plain dumb.

Anyway enough of that.  My wife didn’t seem to worry about any of that stuff because on a few days out of the whole three months that we were away we stayed in an apartment in the middle of Barcelona above a place called the Travel Bar.  The Travel Bar is a pickup joint for under thirty year old Brits (you could tell it was for Brits because it had HP sauce bottles on the tables – in Spain I ask you!).  The great thing about the Travel Bar was that you could get free WiFi access if you had a meal there.  In fact you could get free WiFI access whether you had a meal or not and given that we stayed for six days in an apartment just above the joint we had unfettered access to the Internet (apart form the first five minutes while Vista sorted itself out!).  This meant that we could Skype back to the folks at home and get the web cam going so that the wife could not only speak to the grandchildren but also see them in real time.

So Bill did it again – in spite of having the Vista virus on my nice new laptop it at least managed to satisfy the needs of someone whose greatest hate (as I said earlier apart from John Howard and Phillip Ruddock) is technology.