calculating time remaining.....
When vista RTM was first released an MVP friend gave me one of his evaluation copies to evaluate. I used is as my main OS for 8 months before dumping it and going back to XP. When I first got it I was open minded and prepared to be impressed. Even if I didn't like it myself, it seemed inevitable back then that it would be widely adopted and so I would have to learn it in order to be able to fix it.
My box is pretty old (2.5 athlon with a gig of ram) and although the general overall performance was a little bit sluggish, it was not too appallingly bad. The eye candy was nice but I turned it all off after a couple of days because i wanted the extra 5% or whatever of performance. The UAC nagging might be OK for end-lusers who don't do anything more than bashing out reports is MSWord but as far as I was concerned it was just unremitting torture. Not acceptable.
The nice things were the big thumbnails, the improved picture-and-fax-viewer (does anyone ever use it for faxes by the way ? what is a fax, mummy ?) the excellent spam filter in OE7 (MSmail 7 or whatever it was called) and the cursor going to end of the filename rather that the end of the extension when renaming.
There were a few other small small detail improvements too such as the big alt-tab previews but sadly all these pluses were canceled out by negatives such as the missing menu bar (DUH !) the hidden network connections folder, the command line shutdown being crippled and general application compatibility. The new search seemed unnecessarily complicated too.
One of the most annoying things about XP and previous Windows was the lack of a folder size column in explorer. I imagined that that would be finally sorted out in Vista but it wasn't. Worse still, the third-party folder size utilities I use with XP didn't work at all in Vista as the neccecary API's are removed.
One of the worst windows features has always been a habit of hiding important things in really stupid places (like emails stored in C:\Documents and Settings\myname\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{1D2A742B-69D9-4BCE-ABBA-1F45BFF465C1}\Microsoft\Outlook Express) but unfortunately with the advent of Vista's virtual folders and its roaming profiles this has got even worse. Many more folders tended to come up as 'access denied' too, even though I was administrator (with the extra fixes to make me 'real' administrator (which was another puddle of shite I had to wade thru to get anything done))
The final, and maybe biggest problem of all was the "calculating time remaining" bug. A flagship OS which that is not capable of reliably performing basic copy/move/delete operations is almost unbelievable, but MS Vista was that OS. This bug seemed so big that MS couldn't ever even admit it, let alone fix it. I never found out if there was truth in the rumors that it was a DRM mis-feature but in the end this disability was the final nail in the coffin.
At first I was prepared to be impressed by Vista but having used it for 8 months I was impressed only by what a bloated mess it was, and how little extra real functionality it offered.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
