First impressions
Almost needless to say, Vista is FUCKING UGLY. If it’s not the stupid aero theme that hurts my eyes, it’ll be the font. It took me a while finding the setting to turn of that smoothing of text because that is simply horrible. Naturally I set the classic Windows theme, however so many things are different that I kinda wonder why they still call this classic. Explorer looks completely different, icons changed, etc. etc. etc.
Oh, and the sounds. Horrible. I think I’ll just get the XP .wavs from my laptop and use those instead.
The new start menu is also horrible, the stupid search box doesn’t want to go it seems, and I absolutely hate the new shutdown buttons. And I want the old ctrl-alt-del dialog box back 
Then, UAC. UAC is this security feature that asks for your permission when doing things that are considered sensitive. It would be a perfectly good security feature if it wasn’t so fucking annoying. Having to confirm a single action somewhere between 1 and 6 times is way too much, especially since pretty much anything requires permission. Even when disabled UAC is being a bitch: now I have a little notification thing in the taskbar warning about how fucking dangerous it is to not confirm everything you want to do in triplicate, but there’s probably a setting to turn that off, somewhere.
So far I also hate having to search for things. In XP, it’s easy to find a particular option. If you want to change any display property, there’s a nice dialog Display Properties, which lets you change the theme, background, screen resolution, and so on. Actually, it’s been that way for a looong time and has always worked perfectly fine. In Vista, for some reason they turned it into a load of different dialogs, which doesn’t really improve the experience of migrating to Vista. The did the same thing with lots of settings; I sometimes really need to search for something that was straightforward in previous versions of Windows.
I can keep going on like that for quite a while, but let’s also make some positive notes. First of all, installation was quite painless. It just asked a few questions in the beginning and installed everything from there on, no interaction needed. Unlike previous versions which, while taking fucking long to install, might need input any moment, which makes it impossible to go do something else while installing. It just seemed to have copied drivers from XP and except a small RAID driver issue that was fixed soon enough, I havn’t experienced any driver-related issues at all. Neither have I ran into any compatibility issues so far, but then again, I havn’t installed much applications yet.
I do need more time to make a decision (and make it less horrible), but there is a good chance that – given it’s possible to fix a load of annoying things – Vista gets to boot up by default. But I guess it’s too soon to draw a conclusion at this point
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