The wow starts.. when?

Well I've recently had a chance to check out a computer that had Windows Vista installed on it. Ignoring all the objections to the way MS has designed their new OS towards the singular objective of hijacking end user rights for the benefit of the media conglomerates who's support they're trying to gain..
Let's see what's happened with installing the shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate.

I'm told it installed unusually quickly. And then the next thing I heard was that it was randomly causing the monitor to blank with an error message that suggests that it was feeding it a signal that it couldn't sync too (most likely with too high a refresh rate).
So I take a look. First I was shown the "dreamscenes".. animated wallpaper that looks very pretty, except that it ran so jerkily that I practically got motion sickness watching water droplets trying, desperately, to move in a fluid fashion and apparently uses about 20% of the CPU's power. When you add in their DRM management task that has been reported to also use 20% or more power even when you're not doing anything that involves digital rights managed media then you've got almost half of your CPUs time being used already.
And then the screen blanked. And then came back with an info balloon that informed me that the display driver stopped responding. And then the whole system froze solid and required a hard reset to get it running again.

This is a fresh install of Vista with a minimal amount of add on software that could be blamed for causing any sort of instability.

MS has been running a media blitz that informed me that the "wow" would start now. Apparently Vista was supposed to be a bold new user experience. What I saw was a shiny user interface that looks nice but uses obscene amounts of CPU power just to support (and which also is a blatent Mac rip off, and please understand I'm no mac friend, although is MS continues down this path they may force me to defect to the Apple world), and such incredibly bad stability that a fresh install can't even run for twenty minutes without freezing solid.

I've since been told that disabling the Aero Glass interface has fixed the crashing and screen blanking issue. Isn't that lovely, the much hyped new user interface causes the entire OS to crash.


The truth is that chronic instability or CPU hogging is really the least of the problems of Vista. If you take the time to learn the full extent of what MS has done with it you'll start to see just what they're trying to do. They're clearly working towards establishing a legally enforced monopoly on PC operating systems, and are possibly trying to get the record companies to back them up if it comes down to another showdown with the US government on monopolistic behavior charges.