Thank you for this article. Vista really is a heap of s…t. Started my own business recently and its really slowed me down and is still doing so. Will have to bite the bullet and buy Win 7 but it really p…ses me off that have to pay for it. They should give it to ANYONE that bought Vista. Wish I could change to Mac – might look into it. Thanks again – love your file names!

Ain’t that the truth. I work in the film industry, so naturally my folders are full of odd bits of video and audio and Vista ALWAYS decides I want to view crap like some row of little stars (!!!!!).

No. For over twenty years I’ve managed just with the name (including extension), the date and time of creation (very important when I have multiple edits of the same sequence) and the size. But no matter how often I tell Vista just to display file names and their attributes, it keeps reverting to ‘artist name’ and other irrelevances.

And MS have managed to break search. It was going downhill in XP (asking if you wanted to search for ‘files and folders’ or something else – duh, MS, you of all people should know that there are ONLY FILES AND FOLDERS ON A COMPUTER!!!!!), but in Vista it’s completely broken, luckily I found ‘Agent Rucksack’ which is not only much faster, it also allows for multiple filters.

In my humble opinion, Windows reached its heights with Win 2000 and they haven’t really introduced anything important since. With Vista there are often times that I just drop back to the C:> prompt, it’s quicker and MUCH simpler than f**king around with all MS’s silly pictures.

Thankfully now I’m Vista free, with all my machines are running Win7. Yay!

1. I cant find anything: I want to put settings to what I’m used to and I want to navigate around the hard-drive. Unfortunately files all seem to have been moved to other places and for no good reason that I can understand. The navigator has no “stepping back” button that I can find. I HATE the navigator layout and cannot change it to the format I had in xp. The icons have all been changed, I’m not interested in wasting my time having to learn new icons for familiar file types, like file folders, trashcan etc.

2. It is SLOW. My old computer was orders of magnitude less powerful than this new one; yet on xp it could boot up, shut down and open programs faster than Vista on my new machine.

3. Compatibility is crap – My word files don’t carry over without stuffing around for hours. Out of disgust I uninstalled the useless looking new Office and installed my old, familiar 2003 xp one. Its now stable and faster although Vista continually sends me nonsense compatibility error messages.

3. The clipboard only works half the time, single and double clicks do wierd stuff contrary to my wishes so I end up giving up on the most trivial tasks of cut and pasting files etc. (This was all easy enough for me to do on xp).

4. Perhaps the most serious problem of all, although I dont know if this is a hardware or operating system fault, is the whilst typing text the cursor may jump into some random location of the text, thus rendering my work gibberish. This happens most on Yahoo mail, less on word, and strangely has not happened at all whilst I type in this text box here.

Summary: I hate it, I hate it. I want xp back. Please advise me if I can just install xp with SP3 on my machine without making matters worse.

Thanks