rantlust

Posted by papi on June 29th 2007 in Computers, Rants, Technology
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Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me begin by stating that I have never been one for operating system holy wars. I have no particular affection for Windows, Linux, Unix, or MacOS, nor do I bear any excessive rancor towards any of them. I’ve worked on and used a number of different flavors of Unix over the years, currently am working on an open source project that spans several Linux distributions, and have used Windows on my laptop for many years. I think that operating system is best which intrudes the least, both in terms of not using up resources on the machine, and in not requiring the user to endlessly tinker with it or to spend time figuring out how to get it to work. Of course, all operating systems fall short on one or other of these points, but occasionally one is spawned that’s such a colossal mistake, such a gigantic steaming pile of fecal matter, that one is forced to take one’s case to the only court of public opinion that matters, the blog. Which finally brings me to Windows Vista, and the reason for this post.

My troubles began when, for various reasons, I had to buy a new laptop. I’d used my trusty old HP laptop for many years, and it had been a solid and reliable machine. It ran Windows XP, which I thought was the first real operating system to come out of the MS stable, and other than some minor glitches such as hangs during shutdown, it was fairly reliable. When I was looking around for a new laptop, I decided to go with HP again. To my dismay, I discovered that new HP laptops do not come with XP any more. Rather, they force a buyer to use the new Windows Vista. I finally ended up buying an HP laptop from Costco’s online store, but even they did not offer an option to buy it with XP. In fact, of all the vendors I tried (don’t know about Dell), the only one which offers XP as an option is Lenovo. Even with them, you have to pay extra for the older version (go figure) and they only sell Thinkpads, which are usually double the price of an equivalent HP or Dell machine.

At any rate, despite my misgivings, and based on my XP experience, I got my machine with Vista installed. I expected to see some minor problems with it, and thought it would probably not be as solid as the XP which had a lot more miles under its belt, but even I was horrified by how bad it was. When you first fire up the dang thing, you see a lot of new blinking lights. But then you actually try to accomplish something and come to a screeching halt. In my case, it happened on the second day, when I tried to hook up my digital camera. Vista does not recognize it, and the Canon website flatly says that certain models are not supported with Vista. No driver upgrade, no we’re-working-on-it-warm-fuzzy, nothing. If you have a certain model, and you’re running Vista, you’re shit out of luck. Have a nice day!

Worse was to come. I tried to install my Corel Paint program and use it with my drawing tablet. Surprise, surprise… the pressure sensitivity feature does not work. So now, no matter how hard or softly I press my pen into the tablet, it draws a line of the same darkness. If you’ve tried drawing with something like this, you’ll know why I now have a completely bald patch on the right side of my head where I ripped a piece of my scalp off.

One thing followed another… Cygwin does not work. Apparently some outstanding bug. OpenVPN does not work, so if you’re thinking of using the most popular open source tunnelling software to get into a private intranet (say, your work environment), think again. You’ve just run into a huge pile of Vista. While trying to set up OpenVPN, I ran into myriad other problems. For example, files sometimes don’t show up or cannot be renamed or deleted, because you don’t own them, even if you’re already logged in as Administrator. You have to open a command window with Administrator privileges in order to do that. To do so, merely enter ‘cmd’ in the Run window, and hit shift-enter. How intuitive!! Every time you hit a problem, you merely have to query Google, browse a few thousand blogs, and eventually you’ll find the answer.

Finally, I ended up buying a Macbook. I expect many more people will arrive at the same conclusion. So far, my experience with the Mac has been good. It was easy to setup, things work fairly intuitively, and I have the power of a Unix-like command line interface to interact directly with the operating system, without a boatload of annoying wizards popping up offering non-existent help. The only real downside thus far has been the lack of a good docking solution for the Mac, but I can live with that.

With XP, I thought that Microsoft had finally figured out how to build an operating system. Sadly, it seems that is most emphatically not the case.