Update: It seems I’m not the only one to point out some of these things… To the guy who pointed out the Slashdot story about this, thanks.. Honestly, I don’t read /. regularly any more…

I’ve spent a couple of weeks now with Windows Vista running on a test laptop. So, for that time, I’ve been using 4 operating systems, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Mac OS X 10.4.8 and various forms of Linux (Ubuntu, primarily). Overall, Vista is certainly a bit more easy on the eyes than XP is. But then again, we said the same thing a few years back when we compared 2000 and XP. Did Microsoft simply move a bunch of stuff around, or did they make substantive, useful changes to Windows?

Let’s look at a few examples…

Changes to the Display

For about forever and a day now, you right-click on your desktop, choose properties, and you can change all sorts of stuff, ranging from wallpaper to screen resolution and color depth to desktop icons. Now, with Vista, you right click on the desktop and you get to “Personalize”. What the heck? I don’t know about you all, but when you think about changing your screen resolution, does that make you think “Personalize”? I certainly don’t.

Annoying Measures that Don’t Help

User Account Control, or UAC has to be the single most annoying feature in Vista. The only good thing I can say about it is that it’s certainly a good thing you can disable this annoyance, err… I mean feature. What good does UAC do? If you ask Microsoft, they’ll tell you it prevents bad things from happening to a PC. If you look at reality, all it does is introduce extra clicks that don’t serve any useful purpose. We all already know that users don’t read dialog boxes. They blindly click whatever button that looks like it will get them past the dialog and back to whatever they were doing. Buttons that say “OK” or “Continue” get clicked almost immediately with no attention paid to what question was raised by the dialog.

So what was Microsoft trying to accomplish with UAC? The same thing that Mac OS X does with their authentication dialogs for processes that require root priviliges, or Linux programs like gksudo or kdesu. The problem? UAC is not an authentication system. UAC is all about approving an action. Like I said, it’s certainly a good thing that UAC can be deactivated.

Inconsistent UI

In Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs is gone. Now it’s “Programs and Features”. What possible reason was the change needed? Mouse settings, where you go to do things like change cursors, which sounds a lot like Personalization, now doesn’t it? Doh! There’s a completely different control panel for mouse settings.

Other “minor” things like Vista’s lack of clear differentiation between foreground and background Windows just makes the UI worse.

So, Is Vista a better choice than XP? In a very limited number of ways, yes. Otherwise, it just feels like XP thrown in a blender and cast back into a new mold.