Microsft Vista: Not ready for prime time

My Sony Vaio UX has become my production machine in the few months since I bought it. While I really love the hardware, I sometimes feel that I am getting it to work despite the best efforts of Microsoft Vista. When a major vendor brings out a new version of its leading product, users naturally assume that the new version is better than the old one. And maybe some day Vista will be better than XP. But, typical of Microsoft first releases, the Vista we have today is still not quite fully baked.

I am not a programmer, nor am I an operating systems expert. So I will not attempt a point-by-point comparison of XP and Vista or anything like a full evaluation. What I will give is the impressions, good and bad, of a knowledge worker and constant PC user who has used Vista daily for three months. I am sure that if you install Vista in your company your help desk will hear some of these same comments from your users.

First, on the plus side, it is pretty, much prettier than XP. And I have an XP machine running on my work table next to my Vista machine, so I can make the comparison.

Second, the security is better. For instance, when I start a new application, and particularly when I start an install wizard, Vista asks me whether I meant to start that program. Some users may find that annoying. I like it. Some day I may click on the wrong link and start a piece of malware, and intercepting one such event before it can get going is worth a couple of years of clicking "yes" on the inquiry screen for things I do want to run. And Vista is smart enough that it does not ask this every time I start my normal, already installed software, whether that is a Microsoft application or not.

I also found it very easy to start my firewall, change the security settings on Bluetooth, and manage security in general. In both cases, Vista asked me what I wanted, provided clear choices and made it very easy for me to select the action I wished. Clearly this is a big step forward in helping users handle their own computer security.

Another thing I really like (although this is equally true of XP of course) is that I can connect any peripheral I want without having to find a driver. This is really a comparison with my Palm T3, which does require installation of drivers for everything. Plug and play is really nice when it works as smoothly as it does with the modern desktop operating systems.

Otherwise, on the surface Vista is surprisingly similar to XP in look and feel. I have no problem switching between them. Unfortunately, however, Vista does have some drawbacks:

It is slow! Every so often, for no reason, it just stops. I might be doing something as simple as scrolling down a page of text and the screen will dim and a tiny circle will appear and rotate for as long as a couple of minutes. The only thing I can do is take my hands off the keyboard and controls and wait. This is really annoying, and I do not look forward to having this happen when I am taking notes on a client meeting.

Second, it is erratic at times. The other week I was working in a coffee shop in town, using my folding Bluetooth keyboard, when suddenly the keyboard lost its connection with the Vaio. I tried various things and finally realized that Vista had just decided for some reason to tun off Bluetooth. I restarted the Vaio and got the connection back, just in time for an important teleconference with a client to go over a draft of an article. Yesterday the same thing happened with Wifi. I started the Vaio on my work table and it could not find my Wifi network. I booted my ThinkPad T42, which sits next to the Vaio, and it reported five bars. I restarted the Vaio, and suddenly it found the network. I am pretty sure Vista just didn't activate the Wifi connection.

Third, Vista seems to be registering mouse clicks that I never make. This happens constantly and has made doing things like drag-and-drop in a document nearly impossible. I cannot even highlight text by dragging my mouse over it while holding the <shift> key down. So instead I have to set my cursor at the start of the text and then go to the end, press <shift> and click the cursor. And sometimes that doesn't work because the cursor has magically moved to some place in the middle of the block of text. And this happens constantly in multiple applications, so it definitely is Vista, not a problem with a particular application.

Fourth, and this is the worst of the issues, Vista suddenly will start inserting repeating strings of usually two letters. So I might be typing and suddenly I get this going across my screen: hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. That one actually happened earlier this morning. And if I try to switch applications it just continues typing the string endlessly wherever I put my cursor. Sometimes it will stop if I hit the backspace and delete the string as it appears, but a few times I have had to restart Vista completely (not easy to do when it constantly insists on typing a letter string in everything) to get it to stop. And since this has happened both when I am using my Igo Bluetooth keyboard and the hard-wired keyboard I use at my desk, this is not being caused by a faulty keyboard. Again I am pretty sure it is Vista.

Of course part of the reason for these issues is that Vista is so huge and cumbersome. One of the things I dislike about Microsoft is its policy of adding everything but the kitchen sink to its software. In particular, I do not think a desktop operating system needs a voice recognition system built into it, which Vista (and XP) does. Very few users will ever activate it (I haven't found it yet). And while I will probably try it at some time since it is there, frankly if I really want voice recognition I will install Dragon.

But having said that, there are a few things that I would like to have in Vista that aren't there. The first and most important of those is shortcuts. On my Palm I can set two-letter shortcuts for long words. Then instead of writing them out all I have to do is tap the shortcut symbol and those two letters. Thus "Microsoft" becomes "*ms" and "Bert Latamore" becomes "*bl". I use a couple of hundred of them and they are really speed up my writing and note taking. I can do something like that in my word processor using the auto correct feature to make ":ms" into "Microsoft", for instance. But that will only work in the word processor. I can't use it in email or any other application. On the Palm, because this is part of the OS, it works in all applications.

The second is handwriting recognition. My Vaio has a touchscreen, and while I normally use a keyboard with it, and I have installed the Windows version of Fitaly, a virtual software keyboard I use on my Palm, when I use it in handheld mode I would like to be able to write into it. Vista does include handwriting capture, but so far I have not found a way to have it actually convert the handwriting into type as my Palm does, something I had definitely expected. I may be missing something here, but I did spend some time playing around with this one day without success, so if it is there it is not easy to find. I think it should be the default setting, personally.

Third, I would like a one-button software switch between horizontal and vertical display mode, again similar to what I have in my Palm. I can switch between them, and one of the physical buttons on the Vaio is supposed to do this at a single push, but it never does, and I have to go through an annoying multistep operation each time.

This is not to say that I dislike my Vaio. Actually, I love it. And while I find the negative things about Vista annoying, I am not going to drop back to XP yet. I am sure that all of these will be fixed when the service packs come out, whenever that may be. But at this point my recommendation for organizations contemplating Vista for production uses to wait. And those service packs will appear all the sooner if Microsoft realizes it needs to provide a fully functional version before enterprises will buy it for their large user populations. That will benefit everybody.