Give us Thou a new Vista!

I don’t like Windows Vista.
Wait, I’m not going to launch into a debate about why Linux or Mac or whatever is better, but here are some facts:
1. Its expensive (in countries like India, make that VERY expensive)
2. Its hungry. In fact, I estimate over 75% of PCs in existence right now don’t have enough juice to run it.
3. Inspite of all this, it doesn’t give you much.

Lets take a look.
If your PC is over a year old, don’t even imagine installing vista on it. And even on much acclaimed ‘Vista Ready’ PCs that came a while ago it feels like running Need For Speed Carbon on a 486! It's simply not fast enough.

Okay so probably all good things come at a price. And the price for Vista is having a ultra-high config PC that will eventually slow down. So what are the good things?

Well, even though Microsoft is riding high on the claim of Vista being ‘secure’ and ‘immune to attacks’ (heck, they even feature Bit-Locker™ for encrypting entire hard drives and secure online storage of passwords) we’ll have to admit that most of the apparent changes are in the looks. True, the API has been re-built from scratch, FAT is history and “Save My Search” abilities bring new methods of data retrieval. But boot it up and the first things everyone will notice are the color schemes, the new start menu and a bunch of nonsense on the desktop called a ‘side bar’.

Clearly, Vista is a newbie heaven, but it seems to insult more advanced users. The ‘live search’ all over the place seems to imply the user doesn’t even know what he’s looking for anymore. I mean, we love to search – especially with data flowing into terabytes – but do we really need to search for everything everywhere?
And what kind of an idiot would leave a tiny slideshow of pictures running in a corner of your desktop all the time?

Almost makes me wonder if the whole thing was designed to eat away your resources while simply sitting there and looking pretty. I mean good-looks aside, does anyone really need the 3D flip while Alt-Tabbing multiple windows?

Don’t get me wrong: I love advancements. And when Vista (codenamed ‘Longhorn’ back then) was still in the labs, it was a dream beyond its years. Longhorn was originally designed to ship with a brand new SQL-based file system called Win FS that promised to send FAT and NTFS back to the stone-age! Unfortunately none of that happened (it still runs on NTFS) and the only new things are the bells and whistles!