Vista, It's Over
You blew it. I have simple demands. Browse the internet, use AIM, listen to music, develop with python and php+mysql, seed my torrents, occasionally use Word, and watch the occasional video, and do all that without restarting every 24-48 hours to not be completely bogged down, and you fail at that horrendously.
At around the 48 hour mark, I'm using 90% of my RAM with another 500 MB of pagefile usage, and that's with Firefox exited. I try to play a song in foobar2000 that has been paused for more than 5 minutes, it takes about 30 seconds to a good minute for it to finally start playing, all while the rest of the computer is basically useless while it's trying to figure itself out.
Want to open the start menu? Better give about 15 seconds to get that worked out. O, you actually want to click something on it? Give me another 30 seconds to figure that out. O, you actually clicked something while I was trying to figure out how to make a little blue rectangle? Well, click it again. You know I can't do two things at once. O, you don't want to see the start menu anymore? Well, that will take me another 15 seconds.
Another thing, explorer sucks. It just flat out sucks. There is not one advantage over the old explorer.
First up, the title bar, or lack there of, when using Aero. Yeah, that translucent part is pretty cool looking at first, but having to look at a little strip to figure out folder your in, is annoying.
Next up, that little strip. It among itself isn't the problem, it's what they think that little strip replaces. That o-so-useful up a directory button. Everyone and their grandmothers used that button. They knew what it did, and it was comfortable. But with Vista, they said fuck that and replaced it with a directory list lineage thing and a refresh button. A refresh button, what the hell? Pretty sure it will automatically update itself, so why do I need to refresh it again? And why can I click the current folder name like all it's previous directories? It's like doing 'cd .'. Yeah, I can do it, but what's the point. Why don't you make the current directory look kinda different? That would tell me a little more than just looking exactly the same as the rest.
Next, the menus. Why are they gone by default, and when they're there, they're under the back buttons and that stupid ass strip? At least they lock the toolbars by default, even though when they're unlocked, they can't be fucking moved.
Me: "Hey, I want the menus at the top, where they are for every other program ever"
Vista: "What, are you stupid? You don't need those, we made big buttons that do less, but are more productive. STFU, you're stupid."
And next are those stupid big button menus. What, can people not right click anymore or want the ability to change the size of icons in a matter of 3 seconds using some big as slide? And how often am I going to have to email or print something from explorer that constitutes a big ass button for every folder or file?
And finally, the viewing of the files. I like detailed view showing Name, Size, Type, and Date modified for every folder everywhere. I don't want some shitty music folder view, ever. It gives you some option to make the default view for every folder the one that you're currently using, but does that work? Not very well. It still liked giving me music folder views for those damn folders that were obviously music. Or it liked adding some stupid column, like Tags. Only 1 person in 1000 are going to sit around and tag their files, especially since it requires Right-Click > Properties > Details > Tags Box, which is way too complicated for Vista, since we have to a big ass Print button in explorer to be able to print anything.
Now, the one thing that I liked about Vista, has started to act really shitty. The network connection. It has been performing fine and dandy for a while, it would have it's slip ups, but usually a couple flushes or a reconnect would fix that up, but now it's disconnecting me about every 5 minutes, and it'll reconnect within seconds after the disconnect, which is just enough to kick me off gaim, and pop up a window showing it's reconnecting, which it does very promptly.
Anyway, I've had enough. I'm going back to XP, and Ubunutu once Feisty Fawn comes out. That's it. I'm not coming back to Vista. If there are some huge leaps of development in SP1, I might consider it, but don't hold your breath.