Opinion: Night of the Living Vista

What a great title, and a refreshing change from the usual dumb tacked-on headlines that plague journalism.

I must now share my own recent Vista rant. Yes, I, Tuxchick have Vista Business edition on my shiny new Thinkpad T61. Unfortunately I must keep up with windozes for work, as much as I would love to ignore them completely. But I may boycott Vista anyway, and ignore the piteous cries from my editors.

I will spare you my whining about the endless nagware and crapware that infests Vista. Or save it for another time. Anyway, all I wanted to do was play a textbook CD. Just an ordinary multimedia production that uses a windows .exe to run (stupid publisher).

I insert the CD. I have already waded through the very long menu where you configure the default actions for removable media. There are no global options; you have to configure everyone separately.

CD does not play. It just sits there. The evil and infamous User Access Control does not even pop up and ask me "OMG WTF oh weird, do you want to allow this action you just said you want to do? Really?? No, really?"

So I turn it off entirely. CD now plays. This all ate up a half-hour of my life I'll never see again.

But that's not the best part. Remember the Skype worm? Well to make a long story short, I turned UAC back on, deliberately pointed Vista at the worm, and it got infected without so much as a thank-you ma'am.

Hurrah for six years, billions of dollars, and 16 gigabytes of sterling code! Thank you, Microsoft!

More good new for Vista on CNET of all places:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9785337-7.html?

Can't you just run XP under VMware or so? Nobody requires you to use Vista, or do they? I have to use AutoCAD -- which means I need Windows SP1 as well, and it works good enough with VMWare and XP.