My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.

In an attempt to make Windows more secure, Microsoft has set Vista to pop up little warning messages that the user is supposed to review and “grant permission” by clicking a button every time they attempt to even review settings of any kind, let alone change them. [update: this is "User Access Control" and can be disabled in Control Panel | Users]. This is such a wrong headed approach to security. Anyone but the most nervous nelly user is quickly going to become so inured to the frequent confirmation dialog boxes that eventually they won’t read them at all and will instead just click OK in reflex every time one pops up, so the effectiveness of an annoyance like this quickly becomes essentially nill.

The machine is a brand new HP workstation 6600 with a (slightly) upgraded video card (nVidia NVS 290). Not the best graphics card around certainly, but it can run two DVI monitors at a decent res. and paints pretty quick. The 2D CAD program this machine will run flys on it. Even after ensuring that I had the correct monitor and video drivers, my “experience index” (a Microsoft hardware benchmark measurement of dubious merit) was only a 3.4. This is *supposed* to be enough to allow the machine to run Aero (the full blown Vista graphical user interface) in a somewhat reduced manner, but apparently isn’t since it doesn’t run it at all. I was looking forward to testing out the Windows Flip 3D. Oh well. [update: once I set a user as an administrator, the 3D flip worked. It's not as slick as the OSX method where (in the older 10.4 which I use) a mouse gesture makes all the windows shrink to tile on the desktop and you can see the whole window, not just the left edge and top edge as in Vista]

I managed to install OrCad (a PC board design / layout program) by tricking the installer into thinking it was running on XP (right click on setup, properties, compatibility mode) otherwise it just barfed that it was the wrong version of windows. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault, but seems silly that there is apparently no way for the OS to figure out what environment the program is looking for and just provide it. A human has to know to try this trick to get around it.

We use an old version of Symantec (Norton) Antivirus (v.8). It still gets virus definitions though, and it works on XP (mostly) and has a central quarantine and control server for the whole network, but it won’t run on Vista at all - you just get an unfriendly message (which seems to repeatedly pop up over and over again even when dismissed) that the driver is blocked due to incompatibility. So Windows knows that the driver will cause problems and has disallowed it, but there’s no solution provided? You would think that the *business* class Vista would have a solution for the most commonly deployed Antivirus program in the *business* world (Norton Corporate) even if it is a little old. It knew enough to know it wouldn’t work right, no?

It’s stupid to bitch about changes in the UI, I expected things would be in all new places. I was eventually able to find most of the things I wanted, but they were always hidden in stupid places where I wouldn’t think to go looking for them. There is no “Menu editor” like in Gnome to keep things organized, and for some reason the “control panel” is now a lot more like a pooly laid out webpage with a lot of lists. Clicking on things keeps opening up new windows (just like the old XP versions of these tools so I assume none of them were actually updated at all) everytime you click on something until you have a bunch of windows open which all look slightly different as you drill down toward what you really want - a simple friggin change in a setting!!! Not to mention the several “grant permissions” dialogs that will inevitably pop up to block your progress as you struggle through the morass of ill-design. The UI changed, but it didn’t get much cleaner or more organized. If anything, it’s even worse than it was! Yes, I can learn where are the old crap is hiding now (most of the dialogs haven’t really changed, just what you need to click on to get to them has), but it really seems like a poorly designed mess. To get the Run command back (which I think I use a zillion times a day), right click on Start and choose properties, then scroll down till you see the Run command and ensure it is checked.

The widgets. A poorly executed copy of Apple widgets. You can’t even put them on the desktop, they have to hang out in a dock? I don’t even use widgets on the Mac because they eat up memory and screen real estate and take time to load and in OSX they’re even easier to dismiss! I haven’t played with Vista’s widgets much yet, but they seemed half baked.

The start menu doesn’t have a pop-out function anymore. As you scroll up through the start menu list, when you get to a folder with links inside, the contents no longer pop out to the right, they load in the menu itself, which means the list you’re looking at changes making it difficult to find stuff at least until you realize what’s happening. The color differences in the default Vista basic theme don’t have enough contrast for me anyway. If you operate with the start menu alphabetized as I do, and you select a directory with a set of program icons within it, those programs suddenly appear in the middle of your nice list injecting a bunch of files right inside your otherwise alphabetized list.

You still have to reboot whenever you install programs or change the name of the PC, or join a domain, etc. Once you play with linux machines enough you begin to realize that rebooting a whole machine just because one service needs to be restarted after an install or a config change is really an annoyance we can all do without. It can take some new PCs a full 10 minutes to cycle off and on again - and some older machines take considerably longer. When you have to make that change or install that program enough times, all that wasted time begins to add up.

I didn’t have time to figure out what was happening yet, but Firefox (which is loaded through Active Directory automatically) can’t be set as the default browser. Everytime I re-opened Firefox I would get the warning that Firefox was no longer the default browser. I’d check the box to make it the default, but the next time I started it - same problem. Either Vista doesn’t allow Firefox to run as the default browser, or I’m missing a setting someplace. [update: that was a bug in Firefox 2.0 - fixed in 2.0.0.2. The one that gets installed over the AD policy was 2.0] I upgraded to 3.0.1.

[Next day]
Trying to install Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 was a nightmare. Yes, it’s an old Windows program with a 16-bit subsystem, but we have thousands of Pagemaker 6.5 docs and we can’t spend the time and effort to port them all to InDesign (the only other program in the world that can read them). Opening up the document in InDesign *will* create problems in the document that need to be resolved because the translation is not perfect - you lose words, things shift around a bit, styles get whacked. The initial error caused a cascade of errors which opened windows that I couldn’t close even in Task manager. Luckily I wasted some time writing this because eventually Vista realized I wasn’t getting anywhere trying to close these processes in task manager and cleaned up by itself. At least thats nice. I was finally able to install by using the same trick I used to get OrCad installed (setting compatibility on the setup.exe file in the _PM65 directory).

Of all things to have problems with, Adobe Acrobat Reader! Kept getting “Error 1406 - Could not write value UI (and value ENU_GUID) to key”. Turns out the installer wants to write a registry key and my domain admin account apparently doesn’t have high enough permissions to do it! I spent at least a half hour trying different versions, setting compatibility, moving the .exe to a TEMP folder to run from there, choosing “run as administrator” (which apparently means nothing since I kept getting the same error) before checking my account in User Accounts and seeing that my username was set as a “debugger user”. I had assumed my domain admin account would be able to do anything, but I guessed being a domain admin just isn’t swank enough for Vista. I set my account to be in the Administrators group and tried again with final (and exasperated) success.

Now struggling with simple things, like how to set a program to run automatically at start-up. I found the Windows Defender dialog window (Control Panel | Programs, but if you don’t click it there and actually click Programs, it’s called something else under another sub-menu called “Default Programs”, and you can only *stop* things from starting up). This is nicer than msconfig, but how to add a startup program? Still looking… OK, you can right click on the “Start Orb” and explore and drag and drop shortcuts into the Startup folder just like old times.

Annoyance: to log off, you can CTRL+ALT+DELETE, ALT+L like in the past, but if you are a mouse user, log off isn’t one of the main choices in the start menu, you have to click the little arrow to open a submenu first.

The real fun was just beginning. We have an Oracle 9i database and our ERP system needs to connect to it using the Oracle client. But the Oracle 9i client doesn’t work on Vista. I find in metalink 415166.1 that the Oracle client 10.0.2.3 should work (with patch 5860454). I grab those (huge) files and attempt to install. I end up having to turn off User Access Control (the only thing I actually think is a good security feature in Vista) so that the client can create directories inside the root C:\. Of course, my procedure for installing all this stuff (and the ERP system) doesn’t cover this client, and all the selections are different, and I can’t find the simplest things. This isn’t Vista’s fault, but I am on the upgrade mill now and it hurts. I ended up installing the whole kit and kaboodle Administration package from the 10g client just to get the net configuration assistant which is what I was looking for. I guess in future it would be easier to just figure out how to do this correctly

The ERP system installed OK. Setting environment variables took a few minutes to find the dialog box, but all the methods I’ve been using to connect this suite of programs through the Oracle client to the database works with the new 10g client fine.