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So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we've found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we'd never moved. We should point out at the start that we migrated to Windows Vista under supposedly optimal circumstances. We waited for a few weeks before even thinking about it, so that we'd avoid any early release showstopper bugs. We purchased a machine from a prominent manufacturer (Lenovo) with Vista pre-installed, so we could avoid the upgrade nightmares that have plagued everyone else we know who's been forced to shift to Vista. (OK, that's not entirely true; a handful of Microsoft employees have told us their Vista migration was trouble-free. You can decide for yourself how valid that testimony is.) And we've deliberately kept the installed software on the machine to a minimum, to minimise the chance of an incompatible application blowout.

We're writing this article on the Vista machine, so a bare minimum of functionality has, arguably, been achieved. But that is, quite literally, the nicest thing we can say about Microsoft's newest operating system.

For starters, it's hideously slow -- notably slower than our previous machine, despite the fact that the new model has twice as much memory and a much faster processor. This isn't just delays caused by the User Account Control system, annoying as it is; even basic tasks like opening documents and launching applications are notably slower.

We'd hoped that our new system would boot faster than its predecessor, but in fact it takes even longer, whether or not it manages to connect to any networks. Applications are also crashing more often than on our XP machine, and Office 2007 -- supposedly a flagship application for Vista -- is the most frequent culprit.

The lack of anything approaching basic network functionality is our biggest complaint. We've written before about how direct Ethernet networking caused the machine to crash unpredictably. We've since discovered that Vista is incapable of communicating with one of our Linksys wireless routers, even though the model in question is certified to work on Vista and chats quite happily to numerous other machines.

Multiple phone calls and emails to Microsoft support (which we wouldn't even be entitled to if we weren't in the media) have so far failed to resolve the problem in a satisfactory way. We'll give credit to Microsoft support for trying hard, but if you can't get basic IP working in 2007, something pretty fundamental is going wrong.

Read on to discover more flaws in Vista, including IE woes and why the Vista certification for hardware manufacturers is meaningless.Outside of the basic functionality issues, there are dozens of minor changes that haven't done anything to improve our productivity. One minor example: for years, we've used a basic HTML page stored on our local hard drive as a home page to provide easy one-click access to bookmarks. This turns out to be hopeless under Vista, since Internet Explorer insists on launching any page in a new window because of a security restriction. As such, Vista has managed to convince us to ditch Internet Explorer after nine years and switch to Firefox, which doesn't indulge in such ridiculous behaviour, and seems to run faster as well.Vista certification for the machine also seems meaningless. We can accept, begrudgingly, that some of our favourite applications, like SyncBackSE, are going to generate a ridiculous 'Did you mean this?' dialogue every time we run them. But why does Lenovo's built-in security application, which came preinstalled on the machine, produce the same response?

In a burst of curiosity, we decided to run Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor, to see if our machine was actually up to the task. The first thing it told us was that we didn't have enough drive space (apparently, it's not intelligent enough to realise that Vista is already installed). The second thing it told us was that our display and sound card weren't certified for Vista. The third thing it told us was that none of the Lenovo utilities on the machine were Vista-ready. So much for certification.

We could go on -- about the stupid interface in Windows Explorer, the non-existent search functionality, the arbitrary changes to menu names, even the horrible font choices. But the bottom line is that if we had shares in Microsoft, we'd be demanding changes more extensive than those that came between XP and SP2 to give this dog of a product any chance in the marketplace. That said, we're not holding our breath.

Source:http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12147/1101/1/1/