Some observed recent Vista annoyances that come up most often in discussion with both new and long-time users, as well as what we can do about some of them.
- The top complaint: I here is: "Lack of driver support from Windows, virtually everything prior to Vista made by HP is possibly not yet supported. Not just Microsoft's problem of course as much HP's." Although my Office jet printer/copier/fax/scanner does in fact work fine with Vista, I've heard this one from enough other people to know it's a real problem. Far too many folks are finding that their printers, whatever the brand, either don't work at all or lose some of their functionality when they upgrade to Vista.
- The second complaint is: The annoying and useless UAC. I will often turn this option OFF. One would say, 'not so wise', but then, it does question so much, one gets into the habit of just allowing everything, so what's the difference." I hear this complaint a lot, but I have to disagree that the UAC is useless (annoying is another matter). By limiting applications' ability to run with elevated privileges unless specifically authorized, the UAC addresses one of the biggest security problems in XP: people who routinely log on with administrative accounts for everyday computing.
Sure, if you just automatically click to "allow" without paying attention, that defeats the purpose of UAC. But I know when I'm deliberately doing something that requires elevation (such as installing a program) and when I'm not, and if the UAC prompt pops up in the latter case, I'm not going to just click "allow" out of habit. What would be nice is a way to quickly and easily disable UAC temporarily - such as when you're building a new system and installing many programs in a row - and have it turn back on automatically after a certain period of idleness.
- The third complaint is: The new file and directory structure in Vista. Because some files are in different locations from where they were in XP, it makes it difficult to find things at first and some old tools such as Tweak UI don't work properly because they're looking in the wrong path. It's true that there have been many changes (for example, files that were stored in Documents and Settings in XP are now in the Users folder in Vista). Vista does use reparse points to point the legacy folder locations to the new locations. These are objects that appear to be folders but are really symbolic links to a real folder in a different location.
So why were these locations changed in the first place? It really wasn't just change for the sake of change. According to what I've read and heard from the Vista team, the reorganization of the directories was inspired by Unix and makes for a cleaner, simpler and more command-line friendly structure. Thus, instead of storing music files in C:\Documents and Settings\Deb\My Documents\My Music as was the case in XP, now they're in C:\Users\Deb\Music.
In fact, if you look closely, you'll find a "method to the madness" behind all the changes in Windows Vista. In some cases, the implementation may not live up to the intent, but overall I
still believe Vista is a better, more secure and more user friendly operating system than its predecessors. Like any OS, it has its bugs and I hope they're fixed sooner rather than later (especially the IE 7 "work stoppage" problem).
Peter
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