Let me start by digressing… I’ve got this Desktop Sidebar installed (wich by the way seems to be one of those viral softwares since a lot of people in the team started using it upon looking at my screen) and on the daily comic roll I’ve got the Mother Goose & Grim displayed in it among others. And looking at todays comic made me roll on the floor laughing (not that it does not usually do it anyway) since I realized that I can totally relate to it in the sense how I feel when I log on to my computer at home.
Let me elaborate. I am someone that you could generally put in a drawer with a sticker “early adopter” attached to it. Being one and wanting to be able to write software for it and test my old wares, I signed up as a beta tester for the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista uperating system. Overall it’s been a really good experience with an examption of a few bugs that are inevitable for a beta, but as one of my friends say “Nothing on earth forces you to run beta software, for it may end up on the bleeding edge” so I’ll just ignore those.
The things that really is annoying there is not what is there by mistake, it’s what has been put there intentionally.
So this is basically how you will feel on Vista after the first 15 minutes…
The system goes out of its way to make your life miserable whenever you actually try to do anything other than write a mail or browse web a bit.
Whenever you run any installer, whenever you want to delete anything from desktop, or even purge your recycle bin, the screen goes dark and it pops up an administrative allert from User Account Protection allerting that there might be a problem. Riiiight… Fortunately you can disable that in msconfig.
Similarly if you want to enter “Documents and Files” folder, you will hit a wall on anything but the lowest level. Fortunately you can take ownership and take the control back.
“Program Files” folder virtualization is particularly interesting stuff. Aparently there is action going behind the scenes whenever a program wants to save anything to its folder in “Program Files” after it’s been installed. If you installed a 2P2 app that downloads to its folder, good luck finding the files after you’ve downloaded anything… the folder is buried within a new structure of folders. Aparently there is a new fiolder called “UserData” or something similar in the main folder on your %SystemDrive% (usually C:\), deep within the belly of that monster there is a Virtual folder that contains your precious new mp3 files you’ve just downloaded.
Registry Virtualization was particularly annoying to me since some of my apps set registry Associations for some file types, and guess what? No love for me. The app can save it, sure, but it will get fed its own little chunk of registry that only it will see whenever it wants to read it back, but no data that saves to HKLM or HKCR seems to be be handed to other apps. Now I realize that there probably are ways of circuimventing it although I’ve been told that this is not to be done in anything but the installer… oh well…
So Vista may be the best thing in security since the private firewalls (which I don’t really use any longer since I’m behind a NAT anyway and I tend to be careful about what sites I visit, not opening mail attachments and so on̷ 
for the general users like my dad which indeed need to be driven-by-wire, but power users will really generaly feel like Grim on this strip, till… they go and disable it wholesale, which I am pretty sure will be a standard practice after you install the system.
It’s just like in the above mentioned firewalls, you will always finally check the the “OK STOP BOTHERING ME ALREADY!” checkbox and be done with it.
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