Vista experience turns into consumer nightmare

IT professionals know better than to jump on the bandwagon right away when Microsoft launches a new operating system, but consumers don't have much choice. For Kary, who just wanted a reliable computer that worked like her old one, XP was not an option. All of the PCs she saw at her local Circuit City ran Vista. That turned out to be a big problem.

Then I got the call.

Kary does not care about Vista. She doesn't need 3-D graphics or translucent windows. She doesn't want to explore the wonders of the Sidebar, doesn't care about a raft of "cool" new applets, and doesn't know a user account control from a spreadsheet. She doesn't even want to know about computers or spend her time exploring all of the wonderful things Windows has to offer. She just needs to get her class schedules written up and distributed via e-mail. And at the end of the day, with her new Vista machine, she couldn't do that.

For consumers like Kary, it's really too soon to run Vista. In some ways, the operating system is the Redmond equivalent of a Detroit Monday car*. Vista is fully assembled, but when packaged up and delivered to the consumer in a complete computer system package things don't quite fit together right. And some pieces aren't there at all.

Ironically, the people most capable of dealing with such issues - IT professionals - are the ones that can afford to wait. Their business license agreements allow them to continue to use XP on new PCs that come in. That leaves hapless consumers who need to buy a new PC as the early adopters. If the home user needs a new PC, she will find that every one on the shelf comes with Vista.  Consumers are the front line soldiers in the Vista 1.0 shakedown. Once they've identified and suffered through all of the integration shortcomings that weren't worked out in the beta program, Microsoft will issue a service pack, software vendors will finally get their Vista versions on track, and businesses will gradually make the migration.

Kary is one of those less fortunate consumers. She recently purchased an HP Pavillion a1000 with Vista Home Basic. The fact that it was slow to boot up was the least of her problems.

Vista ready - sort of
Once Kary had picked out the machine, the sales person proceeded to upsell her on a security bundle that included Norton AntiVirus 2007 and Webroot Spy Sweeper - programs she was told she needed to have - as well as migration services to get her files from her old PC onto the new one. The technicians then installed some of the Norton and Webroot executable program files into the Documents folder, where only Kary's documents should have been. (Why place executables in the documents folder, where the user can be accidentally delete them? A Circuit City technician later explained that the versions of Norton and Spy Sweeper it had on CD-ROM at the time weren't Vista compatible and the application files had been placed there as some sort of a workaround patch. Nonetheless, he said, these files should have been placed on the desktop. The files, he added, were no longer needed and could probably be deleted without ill effect. But he wasn't certain about that.)

From My Documents to Migrated Documents
The technicians pulled Kary's documents from her old machine and dumped them into a "Migrated Files" folder on the Vista desktop, rather than placing them within the Documents folder where I would have preferred to see them.

None of the above meant anything to Kary - except that the security programs may have contributed to the machine's painfully slow boot up time.

Photo follies
Then there was the issue of Kary's digital photographs. Within the Migrated Files folder the technicians had placed an EasyShare subfolder containing Kary's library of digital photos, along with all of the Kodak EasyShare image management program files. EasyShare, she was told, wasn't Vista compatible. (A technician later explained that they probably copied the entire program folder containing the XP version of EasyShare to preserve any image file indexing that EasyShare did.) A Vista-compatible version of EasyShare is available from Kodak, but Kary didn't know that. She went home with a machine that would not let her use EasyShare to view and arrange her photos. IT was up to her to pick up the pieces.

What Works on Word
Once home, Kary double-clicked on her documents to edit them, as she normally would, but Word didn't automatically launch and open the file. Back to the store she went. Her new machine had Microsoft Works preloaded but she didn't know how to use the file/open dialog to find .doc files. What she was told - incorrectly - was that Works could not read any Office documents. She returned home with a $150 copy of Office Home and Student Edition. Of the four programs in that package Kary only needed one: Microsoft Word. Ironically, the one other program she could have used - Outlook - is no longer included in the latest version of that Office bundle.

Netscape and Vista: Dial N for No
The biggest disappointment came when Kary tried to set up access to her Netscape dial-up account to access the Internet. Like many rural Americans, Kary cannot get broadband. The store technicians had told her that she needed to order a new CD-ROM from Netscape to install a new client. But Netscape didn't offer one. Not only does it not offer a Vista client, the ISP recommends that Vista users cancel their Netscape service and even suggests that they move to competing - and more expensive - dial-up services. A conversation with Netscape in a support chat window confirmed that it had no immediate plans for a Vista client.

For Kari, that was the last straw. By this time, she had spent hundreds of dollars more than she expected for a machine that appeared to deliver less value than the previous one. She still needed to upgrade her photo software and find a new ISP, and she had sunk $150 into an Office suite she didn't need.

I didn't have the heart tell her how hard it was going to be to download the torrent of required updates to a new operating system, as well as Webroot and Norton AntiVirus over a dial-up connection. In the short time her machine was in my office I spent the better part of an hour downloading and installing program and signature updates over a broadband connection. At the time the machine was just 10 days old.

Could it be that consumers are finally tiring of this game? Early reports from NPD Group, commented on here, show that after PC vendors and retailers sold off their XP-equipped machines at fire sale prices to make way for Vista, the new operating system has produced virtually no uptick in PC sales.

* A note on Monday cars: Once upon a time, automobiles built on Mondays by Detroit's big three were notorious for manufacturing defects. Savvy buyers would check the date of manufacture on a vehicle, then look at a calendar. If the vehicle had been built on a Monday they would avoid it.