I HATE Microsoft

Windows Vista is the most unintuitive and nonsensical operating system I have ever been forced to rely on. I'm sick of having to look up instructions for everything I could ever want to do, only to find that what XP managed in a single buttonpress has become a convoluted adventure for no obvious reason. For instance, I'm a gamer. I like taking screenshots on the fly in some very fast-paced games. Doing so used to be easy: just press Home (prntscrn). But now my Vista laptop needs me to first press and hold the FN Key on the opposite end of the keyboard while simultaneously pressing Prntscrn. It's not that much slower, but those are still crucial seconds wasted in a rapidly changing game environment, and god forbid I actually need a few fingers on the actual controls meantime. Why, Microsoft? Why not just prntscrn? Did you change things around for the hell of it? It wouldn't be the only thing you arbitrarily fiddled with.

Take the layout. Now it only took me a few weeks to basically figure it out, and lot of what still buggers me is mostly phantom XP syndrome sending me every which way, but even when I'm on the ball it STILL feels like it's taking me longer to navigate to a place than I did in XP. But what was WRONG with XP's layout anyway that merited this drastic redesign? XP felt "causal", one thing led to another in a neat, intuitive progression. Navigating Vista feels a bit like hopscotch, if not teleportation. Relative to XP, nothing feels like it's really where it should be, and duplicate folders far apart from each other can cause great confusion. There are, for example, three folders called "Download" spread about, all of which are systemic. They handle different types of downloads, in a way Vista is happy to let you figure out on your own.

And I AM the administrator! I AM! I AM! I AM! There is NOBODY else using this computer. Nobody but me is registered to it! You don't need my PERMISSION to run a program, Vista! I am your master; I am ODERING you to run it; that's why I double-clicked! I know there are ways to make just about anything work on Vista the way you want; I've had to look up quite a few. But I hate people who say "Vista's great! You just need to know how to configure it/how to use it!" Screw... you... and I mean all of you, hard. You are the people who perpetuate the divide between nerds and normal people by making it necessary. The vast majority of people who use computers are NOT programmers or obsessive-compulsive freaks irresistibly drawn to research everything there is to know about anything we've ever heard of. I did NOT have to be taught how to use XP. I did NOT have to reconfigure XP. All I ever had to do was keep the viruses off, a task windows live performed admirably. What I want a nice fanboy or girl to tell me is whether theres' a make Vista good exe hidden somewhere that will reconfigure everything at once. Heck, I'd settle for a pretend to be XP button.

And there's the performance. Vista freezes more often than some clever ice metaphor. To it's credit it often recovers from its seizures, and quickly, which XP typically did not. But XP didn't typically freeze if it was taken care of. Vista freezes for a lot of things. If, for example I attempt to change the volume with the neat little touchpad adjuster while a program is running, that's almost sure to cause it to freeze. Running a program while several windows are open is very likely to cause a freeze, even if it's just windows media player. An important thing to remember when dealing with Vista freezes is that Vista has to be the one to fix them, or else. Do I ever miss the days when cntrl + alt + dlt could actually accomplish something. Now a days it feels like the operating system is fighting as much with me as it is with the paradoxes that plague it, and with its attention thus divided those errors have a much greater chance of victory. Even if you just try to exit out the frozen window (a natural user reflex) it seems like you're far more likely to worsen the problem, at least by making it last longer.

I've had two Vista laptops. One was high-end, with eight GBs of ram and the newest model GBA from ATI. I played Mirror's Edge on it, and the texturetaring was so bad that it was really bad. Conversely, my 2003 PC running XP played the game nigh perfectly, albeit with noticeably less processing power that caused it to lag a bit now and then. It took the US postal service to destroy my XP computer. My first Vista died within a week like a goldfish or something 'cause it simply couldn't handle my style. Now I've got this less-than-high-end notebook with specs that are none-the-less ABOVE that of my old PC in most respects. It can barely handle a valve title, and the texturetaring is omnipresent.

In conclusion, please developers, make games for Apple. Don't force me to try windows 7. 'Cause I will.