The real problem with Vista

So I've been trying out my company's preview ("beta" - in quotes, because, it isn't really beta except in the sense that the deployment method is beta) version of Vista and Office 2007. I've had it running for a while, and I am getting a sense of why people dislike Vista. It isn't just that I had to go all over the place to find out why it wouldn't work with the NT4 test domain that the machine sits in (Lan Manager vs NTLM2) or that UAC is a pain.

As an aside, UAC (User Account Control) is a pain, but not because I dislike clicking pop-ups that ask if I know what I am doing. I find this an acceptable annoyance for security's sake. No, I dislike it because it breaks almost all of my scripts. I didn't realize how much I rely on scripts until they started failing with no error messages. I can't use AutoIt to drive Internet Explorer on my Vista machine (yet). I haven't figured out how to debug VBScript scripts on Vista (yet) - it took me a while to glom onto the fact that it was probably UAC that was causing it to fail.

What bugs me about UAC is all the ways that it blocks actions with no error messages. I understand that the reason for this is probably because Microsoft wants to avoid a denial-of -service type attack with a never ending stream of UAC messages - but come on, some indication of why things are failing would help.

No, the Real Problem with Vista that I have seen so far is that it looks like stuff was changed in the GUI just for the heck of it. Just because they could. And it looks like the decisions of what to change were made by poll - the asked a group of people "which of these changes do you like the most?" and then they went with the one that 55% of the people said they wanted. It certainly doesn't look like someone with a grand plan sat down and made consistent decisions about what to change.

For example: when you go to save a file (in Notepad, or Internet Explorer), you don't get the usual Browse window that we have been seeing for the last 15 years. No, you get a minimalist couple of lines that list paths. You have to click a button to get the file browser window. This is progress?

You can't drag copy files to a command prompt and have the path show up on the command line.

Folder icons have changed. Folder icons changed from Windows 98 to 200 to XP - they got prettier, they got cooler. But they basically stayed the same. Now the folder icons have turned sideways (so, if it was a real folder, the papers would fall out), and, in the Classic theme at least, they are blue instead of yellow. Blue? Why? Folder icons may seem like a minor gripe, but I noticed that in Regedit, I can no longer tell which is an open folder, and which is closed, so when I lost my place in a long list of registry keys, I couldn't tell where I was by looking at the icons.

Explorer is ... weird. Even in small icon view, the column headings show like it is Detailed view. Very strange.

And all the paths have changed, some in weird ways. Why has Microsoft, after over a decade of promoting spaces in critical path names, finally gotten religion about no spaces in common directory names? Is it really possible that after all this time, some developer still can't figure out how to use double quotes in path names? Why, in AppData, do I have Roaming and Local? Is it because Microsoft finally realized that dumping all kinds of critical stuff in Local Settings in Windows XP (like Outlook files) and then ignoring those files when the profile was backed up or migrated was a Bad Idea? Or was it just because they developers could?

Well, enough bellyaching for now. It really does look like someone said that Vista had to be Different, and that is why these changes were made.