Coding Sanity

After my previous bad experiences with the Operating System That Was Shipped in Beta, you might be surprised to find out that I recently installed it on my laptop. Interestingly enough it is far more stable and faster on my laptop than my desktop. My personal theory is that my laptop does not have an nVidia graphics card, nor a Creative sound card. Both are companies whose Vista support was late and uninspiring. Anyway, the number one, most irritating bug that I encounter regularly is file copy. Yep, you've heard me right, Vista cannot adequately perform operations on it's filesystem. I wanted to delete a directory holding backups, so I selected the folder, and pressed Shift-Del, and then had to wait for 2 hours whilst Vista carefully went and, from what I can tell, lovingly worked out the thumbnails for each file it was going to delete before actually doing the deletion. Oh, wait, it could also have been checking them for DRM.

Copying is so pathetically slow for anything large that in some cases, it's actually easier and faster and less frustrating for me to boot up a VPC containing Windows XP, share the appropriate folders on each Vista machine and use the XP to move the files from the one machine to the other.

Microsoft have been made well aware of this bug, but have not yet addressed them. In fact these bugs were raise during the Beta program IIRC, and still, Microsoft have not yet deigned to fix them. Copying files, deleting files..., high-tech shit.

I was inspired to blog this, because this morning I decided I'd like to watch a movie in bed. I powered up my laptop, and selected a movie from my desktop PC, and tried to copy it across. It started "Calculating time remaining", and had 0 bytes/second, and just sat there. I pressed Cancel, and the Cancel button just disabled. I waited and waited, and still that useless, buggy as all hell, copy dialog just did nada. So, I force restarted my laptop and tried again. When the exact same nothing happened, I decided to blog about it. So here I am, still staring at the 0 bytes/second, and still "Calculating time remaining". Here, Vista, a hint, if you're consistently at 0 bytes per second due to some unfathomable bug in your non-release-ready code then the time remaining is infinity.

Microsoft assured us that Vista was production ready, and it is actually a lot better than I feared it would be, but it is not release quality code. It appears that consumers are well aware of this, which is why Microsoft's financial results showed little boost from Vista sales. Microsoft have been engaging with consumers attempting to convince them to purchase Vista and not wait until SP1 comes out. This is a common tactic used by consumers to ensure tha most of the bugs are resolved. Such a tactic will mean far less frustrations for consumers, instead of acting as broad-scale beta testers, they will be hopefully actually be getting the code that should have shipped. I'd like to add that I don't think they should upgade existing PC's but only put Vista on new PC's due to the plethora of driver problems experienced by user of older machines.

Good Points

Is Vista worth the upgrade? So, far, just using my laptop as an example, yes. It's snappier, more responsive, much prettier. I find myself using the one-button off/suspend feature a lot and not bothering to properly shut down like I used to under XP, there's just no need. The search start menu feature has made my life a lot easier. Before, I'd go through my menus, setting up shortcut keys everywhere. Now there's no call for that. Mobility is also better, but I still wish they'd store IE settings like the proxy server against a named network, so I didn't have to keep fiddling that whenever I move from A to B. So, I am quite confident that Vista will be a huge success once they fix all the irritating little problems.

Speaking of which, I wish I could tell it to stop whining that I blocked some starup programs. I did it very deliberately, and it was a well-thought-out idea. Every 30 minutes or so, it pops up a bloody tooltip telling me that it did what I told it to do, and that it followed my instructions when I booted my computer 15 hours ago. I KNOW dammit!