Kevin Bridges

I had the unfortunate need to pick up a new laptop because my other one took a dive. I needed it to perform business functions and could not find a store that sold a Linux or XP based machine for a reasonable price. I have been attempting to set up a standard php, mySQL, Apache configuration with phpMyAdmin and Eclipse installed. I have been fighting with this operating system for over 14 consecutive hours at this point and completely hate the experience I have gone through. My last hurdle before I went to sleep was getting phpMyAdmin working correctly. I finally got it working and was able to access the mySQL installation. I created a database and was able to insert and retreive data through the interface. I turned on the laptop this morning and Vista has eliminated the work I performed last night and disabled what I did to get phpMyAdmin working. Allow me to put this into perspective. 14 consecutive hours of solid work by an experienced developer to simply create a workable environment compared with the hour and a half it took me to perform a clean installation of ubuntu and create the same environment.I can now back up the hatred I have for Windows Vista with solid facts and I have every intention of doing so. Top complaints right now that I have every intention of expanding on in detail:File Sharing is complete crap. I can use Samba with no problems from XP boxes to my Linux machines. The Vista machine sits in a complete void on the network. I can't ping it and it can't ping other non-windows machines. I can't even ftp to another machine on my internal network because VIsta is completely refusing to acknowledge the presence of anything with the exception of media files on another pc. The interesting part of the media files sharing is we never authorized the new windows media player to be installed on the other machine and were quite surprised when we were presented with a prompt on that machine about sharing it's media with this laptop that refuses to network with anything else. I get an error on startup ... the top portion sayssomething along the lines of "Operation completed succesfully" ... the bottom portion indicates the "Succesful Completion" is an error. I'm going to provide a screen shot of this one because it would be absolutely hillarious if I didn't need to work on this machine.You know those Mac commercials with the lawyer interjecting between the communicatios of the Mac and the PC? I'm not a Mac fanboy and gave Vista the benefit of the doubt that the commercial was an over-exageration. It is not. Even when you tell Vista you are the administrator and confirm the multitude of annoying popups to perform the action you want the likelyhood is high it will still tell you that you do not have permission to do what you want.The OS is destroying my productivity. I should be done with the projects I'm working on and heading up to the mountains to go snowboarding. Instead, I am trying to reconfigure what I already had configured and working before I turned the machine off.The underlying system is the same ... DOS commands are stillcompletely retarded. I still have to reboot the machine to join a different workgroup. The main difference is an obnoxiously confuscated GUI that makes most things impossible to find in a rapid time frame.I can't install my paid for copy of Microsoft Office 2003 because the OS has security issues with it.UNzipping files is incredibly slow.  It took an hour and a half to unzip a 118mb compressed eclipse file.  I finally figured out I could download a free program called 7zip to perform the extraction at a normal speed.  Let me rephrase that ... I have to use a third party program to unzip files at a useable speed because Vistahas nerfed the process bad.Positive Attributes:It looks cool. Quite frankly, I could care less about the way it looks ... Get rid of the headache I have and give me back the wasted time I have invested thus far into this thing. Make it work before you make it look pretty you morons.The search function is useful in the start menu because it helps weed through the complete failure of a UI and usability.The fingerprint scanner is cool ... but guess what? It's a hardware/software feature of the Lenovo notebook and has nothing to do with Vista.You better believe I am going to write a lot more about this.