Windows Vista Daily WTF?!

I've never written about Windows Vista before. I've never tried Vista before, but it came installed on my laptop. I wasn't much friends with XP either and so why not try something new.

The first things that shocked me are the horrible black screen of DING!! when you want to access a function that requires admin rights (and a lot of them do). The whole screen goes to black and it comes back with one of those dialog boxes that you just click away and then it's okay (after going black again). I can understand why this is necessary, but it would be a lot less annoying if it wouldn't go to black all the time.

The first thing that I killed is the language toolbar, but okay that's the first thing that gets killed in XP as well. The first Vista thing that got kicked was the sidebar. Yeah sure, nice, plugins, clock, calendar, nice, yes, but...... who needs that? So the sidebar was the first Vista feature axed.

The first thing that left a more positive impression was the built-in search feature. Actually I kept a pretty tidy start menu on XP, set up custom folders with custom icons that I grouped my programs into. With Vista this isn't all necessary anymore, you just type the program's name in the search box and execute it... neat! Infact the "All programs" from the past is pretty useless, it sorts programs by name and puts folders at the end, there's no way I want to use it.

The first thing I added was the desktop toolbar. I love this toolbar and after deleting the useless show desktop link in the quick launch bar (you can do the same by pressing windows-d) it's my prefered way of accessing desktop icons. There's an even more useless 3D displaying of all windows you have button in the quicklaunch bar. That's so far the only thing that I've noticed from those great Aero features... and yes it's gone too. Apple at least has a keyboard shortcut for that (F11?). The transparent windows are also gone already. I actually liked how you can rearrange the windows in OS X, can't Aero do something like that?

But anyway now that you managed to read so far through all these firsts, I also had a few "couples" already: Crashes. Sometimes I click "Open" and explorer crashes. Sometimes I want to save something and explorer crashes. Right now I opened the vista menu and typed "Visua" in the search box and the explorer crashes. I've had Visual Studio crashes on adding existing files to a project, I've had so many that I begin to understand why Vista makes it look like a completely normal operation. How can you have so many explorer crashes with totally ordinary tasks?

And so yes that's my first daily WTF?! experience with Vista and another debut... hooray