So recently I’ve been forced to get Vista, like many other new PC buyers… I’ll attempt to provide an objective breakdown of main pros and cons of this new masterpiece from the Redmond giant’s labs.

At first, I was a bit excited that now even the average Windows guy like me can get his own piece of “Mac” to play with, but not until a few minutes later when some serious issues started appearing out of nowhere. Finally, after wrestling with it for the whole weekend I yelled “No, it is not possible that any firm including Microsoft could release a mass product of this kind that simply does not work!”. My brand new computer kept getting Blue Screens of Death every hour. It wasn’t until a week later when a fresh-released system update downloaded from the net took care of the problem. Keep in mind, I’m not beta testing the OS, it’s been long months since the Microsoft started selling this thing.

OK, I’m going to try to be objective here. Issues are gone, so now I just want to become another happy Microsoft’s customer…

In a nutshell, after a few weeks of use, here are the good and bad things.

Pros:

- “Start Menu” got a great usability enhancement: just start typing the name of the program you want to open and it will be found in… 5 seconds. OK, it’s a bit long, but still useful. The feature also looks up the commands that were executed. (Such as for example names of computers that you tried to access on the network.)

- Generally, search works much better now. Microsoft finally learned from Google that indexing is the way to go.

- [Alt]+[Tab] is now more visual - you get thumbnails next to the names of open applications when you hold the two-key combination. The nice thing is that you can simply click the application you want to switch to, as opposed to hitting it tens of times hoping the cursor would land on that one icon you have in mind.

- Nice screen fade-out effect when switching to “Standby” mode. It seems like standby is also more dependable now. As soon as you press the sleep keystroke on your keyboard the screen fades out and a few seconds later your machine is in the “Standby” mode. I have never had any problem with bringing the computer back on, unlike on XP, where I lost my work more than couple of times after trying to come back from the “Standby” mode.

Cons:

- Speed of operation. This has obviously been the most well-known issue with Vista. It is really slow, even with the top of the line hardware: dual-core processor and 2GB RAM. Sometimes you have to wait 20 seconds for the system to get ready for deleting a single file from the drive. Other times, it takes forever to pop up a context menu or a drop down box with the list of folders. The speed of operation is truly limiting.

- Security features. Vista wants you to reconfirm that you want to open a program you just chose to open. It takes 3-5 seconds for the screen to fade out and present a special dialog box with confirmation. And if that wasn’t enough, the same thing happens when trying to delete/move files from folders such as “Desktop” or “Program Files”.

- Compatibility issues. Another known problem is that many applications will not work on Vista. Personally, I was having problems with Quickbooks, Instant Messaging and VPN software. I’m sure you would have lots of similar issues of your own.

- Many devices won’t install. My USB 2.0 card reader, that always installed in just a few seconds on every XP computer takes 20 minutes to install on Vista. This is how long it sometimes takes for the OS to search through its driver database.

- User Interface got very difficult to understand. Control panel now has many categories and no easy way to use keyboard shortcuts to jump between icons. Names of options are not very intuitive either. For instance, I used to press “n” keystroke in XP’s control panel which did highlight “Network Settings” immediately. Not anymore. More over, I feel like the beautiful graphics made everything more cluttered. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for aesthetics, but why do the desktop icons have to be five times bigger? The ones on XP were big enough and allowed to fit more information on the screen.

- Windows Explorer is now difficult to use. I was trying to be patient about it - I thought MS’s usability engineers must have had reasons to design it this way, but I’d really like to find out why they decided to get rid of the “Up arrow” button allowing to step up one level higher in the directory tree. Moreover, by default there is no top menu that everybody was used to. Instead, there is a toolbar at the top of the window designed to navigate between folders. I’ve tried to use it for a while but couldn’t get used to it. I don’t see any benefits of it.

To sum up, with exception of few good ideas, Vista is a big “no go”. Hopefully Microsoft realizes, that they are better off spending their money elsewhere.