Blah Blah Blah Windows Vista Blah Blah Blah.

So the Internets are abuzz with nerds denouncing Microsoft's latest OS. Apparently, Microsoft's recent purchase has been completely integrated into their latest OS and the Doom of Civilization draws nigh. Or so I gather.

My reaction? Big fat "meh". Vista has been my primary OS at work for a few months now and up until the day before yesterday my interactions with Vista had been almost entirely positive. I think the Aero interface is really slick. I'm in LOVE with the new Start menu, and the "search" box in every Windows Explorer window has come in quite handy. I haven't experienced many incompatibility problems, and none that weren't easily solved, but this is part of all Windows upgrades. (It seems each Windows release makes some things from a few generations previous stop working. Most DOS applications no longer ran in 2000; Windows 95 programs didn't play well with XP; and now certain 98/2000 applications have issues in Vista.) They've finally implemented a working file indexing system that doesn't kill performance. (My Very First Computer, purchased waaaaaay back in 1998—a Gateway 2000 Pentium II 266—had Windows 95 and was wonderful, except that every two hours, without fail, the system would become practically unresponsive for 5-15 minutes while the hard disk thrashed itself to death. It was years before I found out that this was "Find Fast", a "feature" of Windows 95 that would index all your documents for "fast searching". The problem was, it took up so much system resources that I couldn't do anything else while it was running. I have experienced no such thing with Vista's indexing service.) And Vista runs faster than any copy of XP I've ever used. (I recognize that my Vista machine is also much faster than any XP machine I've used, but that's not my metric. Four years ago when I built my first XP machine, it was top of the line and XP has always had slow spots on it. Now, my work computer is what I'd call at the high end of "mid-range" PCs, and Vista runs quite well. So, basically, my metric is Vista runs better on the hardware available at its release than did XP on the hardware at its release.) Certain slow spots in XP which were always infuriating to me just don't occur in Vista. For instance, opening Windows Explorer or switching to a new directory in XP would always produce one of three results: it would take 5-10 seconds to open the window, during which time it would give you no feedback, so you didn't know if it had taken the mouse clicks and was going to open; it would open quickly, show the icons in the current directory for less than half a second, then draw a blank window for 5-10 seconds, then refresh the window with the same information it had drawn initially (damn computer! I know which icon I want to click on and you JUST DISPLAYED it! Show it so I can click on it!); or it would show the contents, but then go down the list drawing in the icons about as fast as I could count them. Vista does NONE of this. When I press Windows+E, Explorer opens immediately. Also, Firefox opens about four times as fast on my Vista machine as on XP. (I've read that Vista does a lot of "pre-caching"; basically, it notes which programs you use the most and pre-loads part of them into memory so they open faster when you need them. This, of course, has a higher memory usage, which accounts for why Vista is such a memory hog, but come on, you can get 2GB for less than $50 nowadays, and since I wouldn't even consider building a machine with less than that, XP or Vista, I'm really not going to complain.)

Sure, there are a couple annoyances. For instance, the constant "security warnings" whenever you click on anything. Those took me all of five seconds to turn off. And I wasn't too crazy about the layout of the new control panel, but you can easily revert to the old one. (Oh, and I like how there's actually an option in the Desktop setup dialog to include a control panel icon on the desktop. Not like it was hard in XP, but now it's even easier to get to.)

Yet, note my key phrase "up until the day before yesterday." Because yesterday, I stumbled upon one hell of a frustration that left me just scratching my head wondering "what were they thinking"? (And reversing the polarity didn't even help.) Every version of Windows has at least one of these, so I guess I found Vista's. As long as that's the only one I think I'll be OK. (NB: this is still better than the Mac OS, where the entire user experience leaves me with that impression.)

So what happened? It started with the need to send an ActiveX control to a user, who for some reason didn't have the proper one after they installed our software. Now, in their efforts to make e-mail an impediment to communication, most companies' IT departments set up their e-mail firewalls to make sure it's impossible to get any important files to the users. With some, all you need to do is zip the file. With others, you need to rename the file to something like .txt. With others, you need to password protect the zip file. There's no set standard policy between companies, and no agreement on what constitutes a "dangerous" file (I've had xml files blocked by some, which is painful, because that's how we send out our licenses now).

The particular company I was working with said that password protecting the zip file should do the trick, so I opened it in Explorer, went to add a password and... hey! Where do I add the password to zipped files in Vista? I looked for a few more minutes, checking menu options, right-click context menus, and toolbar buttons, but nothing obvious presented itself. A quick Google search (I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords (Google applications I use regularly: Google search engine; Gmail; Google Toolbar for Firefox; iGoogle home page; Google Documents and Spreadsheets; Google Bookmarks; Google Reader for RSS feeds; Google Talk; Google Calendar desktop bar plug-in; Google Maps; Google Earth; Google brainwashing...)) revealed that Microsoft had actually taken out the built-in ability to add password to Zip files. Apparently, they thought it was making users feel more secure than they really were, so they took it out to force users to use more secure encryption options. Well, that doesn't help me, who never used passwords to encrypt zip files, but instead just used them to get zip files past silly firewalls. OK, it looks like it has to be a third party option. My free trial of Winzip had expired, and it looks like you can't just keep using it after the trial is up, as you could with previous versions. I installed an open-source program I had read about, called 7-zip, but after looking around in that, couldn't find any "add password to zip file" option (it looked like most of its special options were for its own .7z proprietary format). I downloaded PKWare's (yes, they're still around) product, SecureZip, but deleted it faster than you can say "BALEETED!", after it re-associated all my file extensions even after I told it not to... twice.

And that brings us to the second annoyance. File extensions. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to almost completely remove the File Types functionality of Windows XP. OK, you XP users, open Windows Explorer and select "Tools -> Folder Options" (or alternately, go to the Control Panel and select Folder Options). See that "File Types" tab? Give it a hug and a kiss for me, because it's gone from Vista. Oh, sure, Vista has a "Default Programs" option from the control panel that allows you to set the default program used to open a given file type, but this has nowhere near the functionality of the File Types dialog. Firstly, all you can do in Vista is change the default program. Nothing else. No advanced option. No settings to edit right-click context menu options. No ability to change the default icon. Oh sure, you can do all those things, from the Windows Registry, but you have to a) be an expert in Registry editing, and b) change options in at least two different places. A major hassle. So, here I was with my .zip files associated with a program I had just uninstalled from my computer. It was easy enough to restore the association with Explorer, but then it started using the Windows Explorer icon for zip files, instead of the file folder with a zipper icon. It took me about half an hour of searching and scouring my computer's options and the internet to find the registry key that needed to be set to change the icon. The problem? It was already set to the correct dll file that contained the icon I wanted, but it wasn't showing it in Explorer. (In retrospect, I think it just needed a "refresh" which I probably could have accomplished by restarting my computer, but I didn't know that and had no utility to see the available icons stored within the dll file, or any dialog to be able to choose the correct icon.) Another half-hour or so of searching, and I finally found a utility called Creative Element Power Tools that gives you that File Types dialog funcionality (and a whole lot more). Unfortunately, it's not free, but it does have a free trial. I was able to use it to restore the icon and all was well... except I still hadn't succeeded in password protecting the zip file. Eventually, I had to just copy it to my XP machine (which thankfully is still up and running) add a password there then send it back to myself and e-mail it to the client. Yeesh.

So there you have it. It seems everyone has at least one bad experience with every Windows OS. But what did we do back in the days of Windows 3.11, before we had blogs? Oh, that's right. Bulletin Boards and Usenet groups.

(Addendum: I know that there are a lot of complaints about how Vista is anti-privacy and, apparently, Microsoft can track your every mouse click, but these complaint seem to be coming from the open-source net-neutrality George-Bush-is-using-the-Patriot-act-to-tap-my-phone tin-foil-heads crowd, so I don't take them too seriously.)