Things I wish Microsoft would fix in Vista 

I’m running Vista SP1 – a little bit earlier than most I expect, but I need some of the fixes in SP1 to make the source control in Visual Studio – Team Server work properly. When I first installed Vista, I Google’d endlessly to find answers to the issues I was running into and posted a lot of solutions in my old blog – but these days it’s just a waste of my time. I need a computer that works. Going back to XP isn’t viable. Vista is a huge joke as far as I, and the majority of the I.T. community, are concerned. From what I’ve seen of SP1 so far, Vista still has a long way to go before being reliable.

  1. UAC – go back, think about it some more, make something better.
  2. Volume Shadow Copy – even in a clean install lots of people are seeing errors in their event log. Still not a patch on the Mac OS X Time Machine.
  3. Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol Service (SstpSvc) – doesn’t start. I’ve not done anything to it, or its dependencies, but it burps up this message when I try and start it: “Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified.” – and yes, the DLL is present in system32.
  4. Event Viewer (MMC) – open any event log, press CTRL+F to search for text, once you’ve found the text close the Find dialog. Press F3 a few times in rapid succession (to repeat the search) and watch Event Viewer die.
  5. Power Management – still does screwy things. Yes, even after numerous driver updates from Sony. Hibernate/sleep only makes things worse.
  6. Startup/Shutdown speed – startup in just 6 seconds, that’s what Bill G promised. On average our Dual Core machines take 30 seconds. But why do they take 2-3 minutes to shutdown?
  7. Crazy screen flickerama when Vista starts or shows the login/locked workstation screens. Once in a blue moon you get smooth transitions. I’m using one of the newer and most popular NVidia graphics cards, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
  8. User switching – login to Windows as admin, switch to a limited user, watch as the limited account grinds to a halt.
  9. Network and Sharing Center – a genius idea, shame it’s a pile of steaming dog shit. The layout is confusing, the terminology is bollocks and you’ve turned the XP 3-clicks-to-reset-an-adapter route into about 10 clicks and 2 dialog windows. Either take a leaf out of Apple’s book and steal the Settings panel property, or give me a Network Connections shortcut in the start bar again.
  10. Expand Control Panel as a menu – if you’ve set your Control Panel to expand as a menu from the Start bar, you’ll probably have noticed that the popout menu is too tall for the screen and scrolls. WHY?! Couldn’t it expand into several columns?
  11. IE7 user inteface – oh, right, it’s a clever new redesign that breaks the mould. Ever heard the story about the Emperors new clothes? Now that IE8 passes the Acid 2 test, maybe they could fix the UI so it passes the Doesn’t-Look-Like-Roadkill test.
  12. Empty “Programs” folder appearing randomly on my desktop. Why? I know not. Just make it stop. Tinkering with the paths in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders does not help. Hmm, seems to occur after running MMC.
  13. Default system font is “Segoe UI” – why isn’t it used throughout the UI? http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/26/fix-windows-vistas-fonts/
  14. Put “Text document” back into the right-click New popup menu. Reg fix here.
  15. No SMTP server – that’s right, those smart kids at Redmond decided not to include an SMTP server in Vista, not even in the Ultimate edition. As a developer it’s important, so now I’m using some crappy freeware SMTP server instead. Very poor. Info and freeware SMTP Server downloads.
  16. Vista Ultimate Extras – these were the cool things Microsoft promised if you forked out top wack for the premium edition of Vista. They’ve yet to materialise. Microsoft, you’ve robbed a lot of people. Again. More info.

Ah, rant over, I can feel better until tomorrow when undoutedly I’ll find another bug. Counting down the days to I switch to a Mac…