The Integrative Stream

There just has to be a pony in here somewhere…

A few months ago my mother’s computer died. She got a new one, with Windows Vista on it. Since she’d been running Windows 2000 before, any new machine was going to have a new interface, and I suggested that she just go all the way to the “state of the art” and get it over with. A few weeks later I decided I needed to replace my home workstation, and bought a new system myself, equipped with Vista Ultimate.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and have developed opinions. My initial impression was positive – cautiously so, but positive. The new operating system was peppy enough, but my new workstation has a top-of-the-line, quad-core processor and four gigabytes of RAM, plus the graphics card that ate Manhattan. To put things in some kind of perspective, the graphics board in this system has more raw computing power than my first five computers combined, and that’s without springing for the really fancy ones that the games use. And I didn’t have any of the installation issues people have reported, but then again, I bought the thing entirely preconfigured. It’s a Systemax from Tiger Direct, incidentally, and I’m actually quite happy with it – nice machine, well integrated, quick shipping, and not loaded down with demoware. They even tossed in a one year subscription to CA Antivirus, rather than the 30 day trial you usually get, and the whole package was well under $2,000, including a terabyte of storage, dual DVD drives and sundry other extras.

No, the problem is Vista. The new user interface is fine, and didn’t take that long to figure out. And the new windows are very pretty. The periodic crashes are not as pretty. It doesn’t happen that often while I’m working, but I frequently come back to discover my computer has reset itself. Others report similar experiences. Configuring external devices was also a challenge – my home printer is attached to a Windows XP system, and while I was able to get it working with the new Vista machine, it took several arcane networking moves to do it, including some driver updates (easy) and NetBIOS reconfigurations (not entirely obviously).

Then mom tried to print multiple copies on her Vista machine. It didn’t work. One copy came out. She needed about 150. This was not good. She clicked a lot, and asked me why, again, I had burdened her with this loathsome operating system? Subsequent research showed that many drivers for Vista don’t implement the full feature set for some older printers – like the four year old HP Laserjet 2200D she had. “Full feature set” apparently includes printing multiple copies. No solution has yet presented itself. I just tried printing multiple copies on my trusty Samsung – and no success.

So what do I like about Windows Vista? Precious little. To be fair, the design of the Windows Explorer interface has improved somewhat, and having search implemented in the operating system (albeit just like what I used to get from Google Desktop) is a nice touch. But they had better get that service pack out soon.