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Information Week asked six of its readers to give them a review of Windows Vista and the results weren't good.

Problems to date are mostly driver related. I am having all sorts of problems with power management (can't wake up out of Sleep, system starts up in the middle of the night for no identified reason, restart/shutdown often hangs). From what I've been able to find, there are apparently known issues (unresolved) with ASUS/nVIDIA drivers? This problem is really a pain!

Whoah, back up. Starts on its own?!

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From this page:

Most people don't care about DRM... until it interferes with the Right to Fair Use. If you buy any other product... be it a gun, a car, a chainsaw, a pen, or a knitting needle... you can do whatever the hell you want with it... because it is yours. DRM-protected content is the only product out there that prevents you from doing absolutely anything except for the original intent of the product. If I want to be able to move it to another machine that I own, shrink it for a handheld device, edit out the commercials (all things that the Right of Fair Use allows)... whatever... forget it. And THAT is what makes normal people mad about DRM.

Yup

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The Register has been following the story of a massive archive of "dirty tricks" that Microsoft performed during a lawsuit. Recently, the archive disappeared from the Internet, but now it's back in the form of torrents.

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When XP came out, I noticed that the cheapies (the really skanky brands) had 256MB of RAM while all the others came with 512. This is because 256 was the minimum recommended RAM size from Microsoft so it was technically "acceptable". The fact is, just because it runs doesn't mean it runs well. Well Vista is the same, only worse. The minimum recommended RAM size is a laughable 512 MB. I just recently upgraded to 1GB in my home XP machine and have been very seriously considering at least another 1GB for performance.

This Computerworld article recommends 4GB for Vista and explains why. From the article:

For instance, Dell offers a Windows Vista Capable configuration that isn't capable of much, according to what Dell says about it on its Web site: "Great for ... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games."

To coin a phrase: lol.

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Today on Schneier's blog, he describes in farily decent detail why the DRM in Windows Vista is bad. Some choice bits:

And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM doesn't work, and just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system ever invented, Microsoft's won't keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft's bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to.

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Scot Finnie, a Windows expert who has been following the development of Windows Vista has given Macs a try for the first time.

After living with the Mac for three months and comparing it to my Vista experiences, the choice is crystal clear. I've struggled to sort out my gut feeling about Windows Vista (see "The Trouble with Vista"), but the value and advantage of the Mac and OS X are difficult to miss. While I continue to work with Windows XP and Vista on a number of other machines, I am now recommending the Macintosh for business and home users.

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In his review, he's quick to point out that 80% of the changes in Vista are good. In fact, it's very good. However, the company has shifted its focus and it shows. Some highlights from his article:

Microsoft stopped focusing on end users and now seemingly makes many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy the deep focus on milking the installed base for every penny goes against my grain. I fault the DRM stuff quietly baked into Windows Vista in part because it is quietly baked in. The people who gain from this technology aren't the people who are paying for Windows. Microsoft has already made ardent enemies of previously more or less happy Windows users through the use of its previous-generation antipiracy measures, Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications and Windows Product Activation.

The wrong choice, every time.

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According to the Washington Post, IE was unsafe for more days out of the year than not in 2006.

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

Well dang. It's no wonder every computer expert I know says to use Mozilla or any non-IE browser.

Microsoft - profits before customers

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Apparently, Vista will not let you install on an empty hard drive with the "upgrade version" as previous versions of Windows did. This is a problem only for some, but it's significant.

What Microsoft is trying to do is convert their software market into a licensing market. This way, no one owns software, only licenses. As an analogy, assume you've purchased the ever so expensive xbox 360, but you're moving across town next month. When you hook up the game system in the new place, it refuses to play games stating that you need to call Microsoft to purchase a new site license. You call and demand to know what happened and the foreigner who answers says that the original purchase price of the xbox allows for only one site so you need to purchase the right to use it elsewhere.

Consumers who want to be in control of their own computers should stay away from Vista.

If you don't want bad press, try making a better product.

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That seems to be an undercurrent (or more than an undercurrent) of thought on the web. Here is a list of 10 good reasons not to buy Vista.

The point about Windows being released with the need for a hardware upgrade is something I can relate to. When XP came out and I was still working retail, they were recommending a Pentium 333Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. I told people not to even try XP without a bare minimum of 400Mhz and 512Mb of RAM.

My experience is that they list what it takes to make the computer not fail when loading, not what it takes to make it run decently. And from Badvista.org, where I found the link to the top 10 list, I also found this article:

Vista is being marketed to content producers, not consumers... These changes won’t enhance user security unfortunately as they were designed to protect only “premium content ?... The new Vista scheme signals to me that they have exhausted new customer acquisition and are now focused on milking their existing market.

Ouch. Well, if you don't want bad press, try making a better product.