Vista has been out to the public for about a month now. It didn't like my current box, and I was already having residential customers buying it and asking me to help, so basically I was forced to buy a new box. I've been using my new box for about 10 days now.

The first word that comes to mind with Vista is "Frustrating". Stupid little things they've changed to make it "Easier" for the dope user, but overly complicated for someone who is up for the task. The User Access Control (UAC) is a joke (I'll explain why later). I swear I think MS is trying to alienate the IT community by not having enough hardware drivers for Vista and making nearly every program have to be re-written to work with it, not to mention almost all new hardware to run the beast. What ever happened to a painless upgrade. Vista is not painless to say the least.

One of the first things I ran into was UAC. Every time you turn around its asking you to approve whether or not you want to fart, blow your nose, blink your eyes or god forbid make a change in the control panel. The first thing I did was disable it. Funny thing is, I found out this has consequences too. Try installing Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.0 with the UAC turned off. It won't install properly, although there is a workaround. As it turns out, there are places on the computer that even the Administrators of the box do not have permissions to. This location is where the UAC works. The other unbelievable thing I found is the Administrator account is disabled by default. Why in the world would that be desirable? Lets just say you need to log into the computer using the Recovery Console. How many users are going to know their user id that had administrative rights? The other reason the UAC is a joke is how easy it is to disable. In addition to just being a registry setting (Change requires reboot), there is also a way to fire off a program in what is called "Escalation Mode" (EM). Once EM is given permission, UAC is turned off until that program finishes doing whatever it needs to do. EM doesn't even need to reboot to work. Seriously, how long is going to take the Spy/Ad-ware community to figure that out?

The next thing that annoyed me was the networking. Again, it looks easier, but try to do something advanced, like change the Bindings (BTW, After a good hour of searching, I found the solution). One of the programs I use is called FreePops. Usually you configure it to connect to localhost, but it would not work. When I pinged localhost, I was not getting reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx but instead getting IPv6 information. You now have to force Ping to use IPv4 by using the -4 switch. Has IPv6 taken over already and I just missed the sticky note on it? What a pain. I thought I might be able to remove the IPv6 Protocol but under Vista, that is not an option. Then, I thought I might be able to change the binding order... but for the life of me could not find where to change it. Finally, I happened to cross a document saying something about hitting the Alt key while in the Networking Dialog. When you do that, the Missing "File, Edit, View... " menus re-appear, and the Advanced is there as well. FYI, the "Alt" button also works to make the "File,Edit,View.." appear in the Explorer as well. How stupid is that?

I've also noticed the constant hard drive turning, even when I wasn't doing anything. The "Windows Search" was the cause. Disabled.

Anyone else beside me find it really obnoxious that in IE7 you can't reorganize the toolbars? Firefox to the rescue.

Windows Defender. To slow, little value. Disabled.

Vista Basic. I couldn't believe it didn't include the Aero theme. Without Aero, I'm finding it hard to find the point of the upgrade.

Themes / Screensavers. Aside from Aero its about the only theme. They've all but removed any option to change the Screensavers. I found a web site that has the registry hacks, but why should we have to go to that trouble?

Sorry for the rant, but I thought I would pass along my experiences. What do you guys think?