Vista upgrade flowchart

My biggest issues with Vista so far are:

1. All the cool features were stripped out or toned down. WinFS is a big missing feature. Even Microsoft knew that search in Vista wouldn't be as good as Spotlight in OS X Tiger.

2. The security is annoying, and likely to not be effective. People are going to be tired of it, and turn it off, or click OK to everything. And I don't trust Microsoft saying it is secure. Thats a label that will have to be earned, especially after the "secure" Windows Server 2003 was able to be infected by worms during the install process, a first for any Windows version.

3. Backwards compatibility is a mess. Sure, it runs most old programs, but so many things end up disabling Aero randomly, so for people with certain programs, get used to an inconsistent interface all the time. Microsoft should have just dumped compatibility out of the core OS and put it in a sandbox, ala Classic in OS X for running OS 9 apps. The constant disabling of Aero causes Flip3d, live previews and other UI changes to be turned off, so people won't have a consistent way to switch tasks.

4. Too many versions. This sums it up. The boxed copy should have just gone with what Ultimate is, and been priced decently. Also get rid of the 32/64 bit barrier. 64 bit Windows on x86 still actslike the Itanium version did, and the only reason for that was the split x86 32 bit and ia64. x64 doesn't need that split. If OS X, Linux, and countless variants of Unix don't need that hard split, neither does Windows.

There are other issues I have with it, but that is a good start so far. I will admit there are a lot of good improvements in it, but I don't think it is worth it. One good change is the rewritten audio system. No longer do audio drivers sit in the kernel, so crappy Creative drivers shouldn't blue screen the system anymore. Of course, along with this, Microsoft broke hardware accelerated sound support with little warning, so now anyone with those cards will have to wait to regain functionality they once had.