Video: The obligatory freaky-awful Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ad for Microsoft

Vista’s OK …and Microsoft has for some unknown reason moved effing stuff around for no good reason like forever.

(I recall in ’99 desperately trying for a couple of minutes to find where they effing put Windows Explorer while trying to help the CEO on his brand new XP machine; of course, I’d never seen XP before …feeling like a no-nothing idiot …gad, I was pissed at Microsoft for effing years about that.)

With Vista, it’s worse than just moving crap around: in their infinite wisdom, they diabolically decided to rename crap (like Add-Remove Programs: now WTF point was that?) AND move stuff around.

Biggest pet peeve: they’ve totally screwed with the folder structure. It took me hours to find crap (and weeks to become usefully “familiar” with locations …I’m still clicking on those useless file/folder “markers” that they put in, which I can only guess is so that XP compatibility doesn’t totally break on every 3rd party application in the world …which, from the sound of it, happens too often regardless). I can only guess they did this to make it more Registry similar (I haven’t run a comparison to test that theory yet though).

But as far as that goes, it’s more stable than XP (yes, you heard that right). It has a MUCH better event logging (almost too much better: inasmuch as it’s so feature rich I’m still working my way through it).

You can pretty easily turn the eye-candy off (and it needs to be: Aero’s a performance killer), and drop the GUI back to more like the Windows 2000 one (actually, it’s almost exactly like W2K). And just do turn off the UAC (it’s only there to cover MS’s a$$ in the event of another class action lawsuit) …and immediately: too, too annoying.

But I don’t think it “sux” per se. All-in-all, I like using it on the 3 machines that I have it on.

But as a sys admin, I’ve pretty much banned it on the small-business networks (generally 5-25 users or so) I provide contract-support though …because of the user training, and the lack of legacy support (machines & especially 3rd party apps). Machines are relatively low-cost: people aren’t …and I don’t think the genius-boyz at Microsoft quite understand how expensive re-training is.

That said: my real beef with Microsoft is the purely idiotic changes in the ribbon bars for Microsoft Office that someone already mentioned. THAT is a fricking nightmare. (Both for user support, and re-training.) My end-users (and hey, those are MY *real* clients) hate it; and I ain’t fond of it either.

I’ve actually started recycling old Office licenses (back to Office 2000 …Exchange includes Outlook 2003 per user licenses thank gawd, so that hasn’t been a problem) to new machines (unlike XP, Dell doesn’t sell Office 2K3 as an option anymore …too bad, they’d lock up sales with that, too).

My other “solution” has been to install Open Office on several machines (users had no problems with that).

Sheesh. Would it have been so fricking hard to have included a one-button “classic theme” for the fracking thing? (And yes, I know there’s after-market “solutions” that provide this …rather *makes* the point though, don’t you think.) No, I don’t mind saying Office 2007 sucks at all.

davisbr on September 7, 2008 at 4:25 AM