How Hard Does Vista Suck?

I have been involved with Vista from the earliest Connect builds to the latest SP1 tests and I must admit that I love it. I appear to be alone at that. Over the weekend, one of my Dallas neighbors (we literally look directly at the American Airlines arena) wrote a post entitled Once you go Mac in which he explained a switch to a Mac – now this guy is not a n00b or unfamiliar with computers by a long shot. Earlier this weekend New York Times took endless jabs at Vista in an article that was actually bashing Apple’s retail quagmire.. Which leads me to the following questions:

Does Vista really suck that hard?

Is it your fault (poor system specs) or your computers fault? (poor choice of software)

Is it the software (Office 2007, McAfee) or the operating system (Indexing Service) that is causing the problem?

What have you done so far…

I am not a workstation guy, I’m a server/network guy. I’ll admit that ignorance right away so you can just laugh me off when I say I really like Vista. But the questions themselves are valid, and something we as “computer support” people ought to be able to answer fully.

I have written before, as Mark has written today, that Outlook sucks. We have had to roll back our Office 2007 deployments because of it, I have gone to OWA on my work computers, etc. The Dip, you know. I gave up on Outlook before it ruined me.

But Vista? Crashing? Hanging? Really?

I’m prepared to share some Vista tips with all’y’all but I wanted to extend two invitations to my tech-savvy audience. First – am I really ignorant here about Vista? (about Vista, not other things – vladville.com doesn’t have the disk/network capacity to address other issues) and Second – Help a brother out (blog a tip about performance tuning Vista) – just one tip a day and link it to this post.

At the end of the week I’ll put up a big splash page with all you can do to make Vista not suck. One guideline: Provide a con/pro of the change being made. For example:

Tip: Turn off UAC

Description of how to do it…. { }

Pro: Work effectively without dismissing endless access priviledge escalation warnings.

Con: Disables most of the security advantages Vista offers.

As with all IT consulting, the tip doesn’t have to be good (consulting = prolonging the problem) it just has to have an immediate impact (even if its bullet to the head in terms of functionality, security, productivity).