I tried it again. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my laptop. I am not impressed.

I tried out Vista for about a week last year when it was first released. I liked the Windows Aero theme quite nicely, and the new desktop wallpapers of beautiful nature landscapes were a welcoming step up from XP’s tired set of backgrounds. However, there seems to be no real advantage over XP.

The core functions of the OS appear to be almost identical to XP. Microsoft has added a lot of new stuff “on top” of the OS, like a completely useless sidebar on the right-hand side. This sidebar features an analog clock, a photo slide-show window that rotates through my photos in the Pictures directory, and an RSS reader that is not big enough to display an entire headline. I understand that these widgets are customizable, but for standard widgets, they are a complete waste of time.

Network configuration has been made more complicated. I had trouble connecting to a few wireless networks that usually work fine. Vista related? I don’t know.

Everything seems to be hidden from the user. You have to really dig to change preferences that used to be easy to change in XP. Once you get to the dialog window where you can actually make the changes, it is the same ol’ XP dialog windows. This makes me feel that Windows Vista has been ‘dumbed down’. Settings are hidden from the user and only accessible from one place now. This keeps things simple for the non-windows savvy users, but power users favor the accessibility of getting to the same place multiple ways. I guess Vista is not made for power users? Power users… please continue to worship OS X.

I went to a local Web Developer Meetup last week. I asked one of the members I was chatting with if he used Vista or XP. His reply was: “Nobody who does any real work uses Vista.” I laughed… I thought it was a funny observation. I couldn’t imagine that Vista could be that bad. I laugh again, but now because he is absolutely right.