Top Ten: Reasons to Downgrade from Microsoft Vista

As a Software Engineer, and Microsoft Platform developer since 1994, today's Top 10 list gives me no pleasure.

I've never worked for Microsoft (might have come close, but never pulled the trigger), but as a Microsoft Platform developer, I do have an interest in keeping up with Microsoft. Until recently, I was a big proponent.

Vista changed all of that. The industry claims that it has been a "disappointment". Funny word, that. I'm disappointed when I don't complete a task perfectly. This, my friends, extends way beyond "disappointment". Instead, the following words are more applicable: disaster, RISK, anchor, BLOAT, legacy, unready. Personally, I really think that the RISK to Microsoft and to enterprises by Vista is way underestimated and underreported. The product puts Microsoft at long term risk, and puts enterprises using it at short term stability and financial risk.

With all of the said, on with the Top 10...Reasons to Downgrade from Microsoft Vista!

10. It is so great and so successful, that hardware manufacturers rolled back to sell and support XP and Microsoft offered to let people downgrade.

9. It has a large number of awesome out of the box features, that any user not in a retirement home will quickly learn to either turn off, or pay someone to turn off for them.

8. Aero strives to keep up with the competition, but is a hog, and honestly not much of an improvement. Most of the visual useful features (move over previews of windows for example) could have been provided in an XP service pack.

7. So many people are frustrated with Vista that Microsoft has actually had to tell people that help will take a long time to get to them...don't expect improvements with Service Pack 1, if EVER.

6. It is HUGE. It eats disk space and chokes on memory. How can this beast crawl at times on a 2.4ghz Dual Core machine with 320gig of disk space and 4gig of RAM?

5. Run as Administrator. So much could be said about this that it makes one's head hurt. Summarize the problem this way: if your MOTHER downloads a slots game from a website and wants to play it, she is instructed to RUN IT AS FREAKING ADMINISTRATOR TO INSTALL IT, AND SOMETIMES PLAY IT! This is simply an attempt to shift responsibility for malware from Microsoft to the end users. Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.

4. Do the words 'NOT RESPONDING' mean anything to you? It will with Vista. IE not respond, Word not responding, Explorer not responding, FREAKING NOTEPAD not responding. If my fat fingers can move so fast to speed past vista (doing ordinary tasks), does that sound like my problem, or Vista's problem? (Hint: it isn't my problem).

3. I want to understand sidebar. I want to like sidebar. I want to respect sidebar. I want to kill sidebar. I want to love sidebar. Sorry, I was distracted. What is the freaking point of this thing? It isn't as good as what the Mac offers. It is only useful on multimonitor displays. It is strange that if you have Google Desktop, it is painful to use Microsoft gadgets (and vice versa). It eats memory, on a platform that needs to be treaded for an eating disorder.

2. Internet Explorer doesn't work well. It often crashes without warning (prompting web based business systems to lose client side state/data). It consumes lots of memory at times (I've clocked it using over 1.5 gig of RAM!)

And, FINALLY (which is what people will say with Vista++ is released), the #1 reason:

1. Vista took so long to finish, and had so many features removed, and costs so much (hardware upgrade + software purchase cost) to own, it is SCARY SCARY SCARY to think of how much it would have ACTUALLY cost if all of the DROPPED features had actually been INCLUDED.

This Top 10 may be amusing, and may be accurate, but it was depressing to write, and gave me no pleasure to compose.