Time for a first look at the not so nice aspects of Windows Vista. And believe me, there are many of those. I'll start off with parts of the user interface I really don't like and couldn't get used to even after a few weeks.

The bad

Window look: I've always liked nice 3D effects and transparency. Heck, they are appealing to the eye and just like we say in German: "Das Auge isst mit." (If you don't know German, it means something like "The eye also eats.") So, I'm fine with eye-candy under one condition: It can't reduce efficiency. That means good performance and good usability. Cause 3D alone never made for good usability.

In terms of performance Vista doesn't do very bad (or at least not because of the graphics) and usability is mostly unaffected by the new Aero interface, but there's one seriously annoying point: the title bars of the windows. It's almost impossible to distinguish the active window from the inactive ones because the title bars are transparent and whatever is behind it (desktop background, other windows, etc.) shines through. So you can't rely on the color of the title bar anymore. See for yourself:

The only reliable indicator for the active window is the red close button at the top right corner. That's hard to get used to.

Explorer: While Explorer usability has improved quite a bit in general, one thing that was really stupid to remove is the text in the title bar. Okay, it's right below but it's not as quick to pick up while you glance over the different windows, and the option to display the whole path was horribly crippled. According to the UI help enabling it doesn't actually have any effect until you switch to classic mode, which hides the tree bar on the left side. (I'd like to see the usability study that made the connection between these two elements.) In reality the full path still doesn't actually show in the window's title bar, it only becomes visible in the Alt+Tab window selector, a change that is independent of classic mode.

Hiding the tree bar has one advantage, namely that there is a reduced delay when opening Explorer windows (on my system it takes 2-3s sometimes, just because the system is waiting for the tree to be generated). However, you almost completely lose the ability to access the context menu of the folder being displayed. On XP you could right-click the icon in the upper left window corner, but that doesn't work anymore because ... it's not there. Even the big fat folder icon in the lower left corner is useless because rightclicking it either gives you the context menu of the current selection or a generic view menu when no selection is active.

Since we're on the topic of usability: There is still no shortcut for creating a new subfolder in the current folder! This simplest of features has been missing since--yes--Windows 95. Even in Notepad you can press Ctrl+N to open a new window. Why doesn't this work in Explorer? (In the meantime I found a great open source tool called AutoHotkey. It can do quite a bit more than the name indicates and adding the shortcut to Explorer is a piece of cake with it.)

Another weak point of Explorer are the different views. The variably-sized icons are fun to look at but quite useless in practice, except maybe for photo folders. It's very questionable whether any user needs the 'Tiles' view or a 'Small icons' view (horizontally sorted) next to the 'List' view (vertically sorted). What's worse is that, in contrast to previous versions, even if you tell Explorer to use the same view for all folders, it still sometimes overrides the user's choice.

[2007-06-18, Update:] When I saw the following I was torn between praying for the Vista Explorer QA guy to be fired and just going to bed and crying myself to sleep:

Yes, column headers that make no sense whatsoever. And, by the way, the headers are also there in other views where it doesn't make any sense, notably in the different icon views. [End of update.]

It almost feels like the Explorer developers never actually use their own program in productive day-to-day work. Rumor has it they're a bunch of disgruntled Windows users secretly trying to convert people to Mac OS X and Linux.

File open dialog: The new file open and save dialogs are not bad, their usage is streamlined with the rest of Windows and Explorer. Slight problem, however: They sometimes take up to a few seconds to come up after selecting the Open or Save menu entry. During that time the application looks like it hangs for no visible reason.

HyperTerminal and Telnet: Telnet is a powerful program that I use on a regular basis. HyperTerminal is somewhat of a pain but it can be useful at times when you try to talk to a serial device. But ... where did they go in Vista? Luckily, the Windows help explains:

HyperTerminal is no longer part of Windows. However, you can use Telnet. It's a simple, text-based program that you can use to connect to another computer over the Internet.

Hmm, ok. Don't know how to talk to my COM port now but at least I can use Telnet to talk to my mail server, can't I?

C:\>telnet
'telnet' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Right. Well, someone at Microsoft either decided that the telnet.exe in the system32 directory was too confusing for the average user or that it just takes up too much space. After all, saving 75 kB on a system that uses several GB after a blank installation does make quite a difference.

In case you're still wondering how you can get it back: Either install it manually or just copy it over from an old XP you have lying around.

Mouse responsiveness: Windows XP was pretty good in that it was almost always possible to at least move the mouse to test whether the system was still responding. Maybe it's the new 3D look or just the way my graphics adapter driver (ATI Mobility Radeon X1400) handles it, but quite often during heavy I/O (usually caused by excessive swapping) the mouse just freezes for a few seconds.

Accessing shares: Vista has the very annoying habit of always prepending the current domain name when logging onto foreign computers. What this means is that, if the target computer is not in the same domain, you always have to manually specify the computer name. At first it sounds as if this could be worked around by a few extra key strokes, but thanks to that nifty little "feature" I couldn't get WebDAV to work at all! When I try to log on to a WebDAV folder as user 'martin' on 'myhost.net', it always tries to log on as 'myhost.net\\martin'. Obviously that will fail and there seems no way to prevent that.

It's hard to imaging that they could have broken WebDAV support even more than it already was in Windows XP (I had to open a folder through Office first to get it added to the Windows network links), but in this case they've actually done it.

[2007-07-04, Update:] There is a workaround using the command line, which I'm describing in Getting WebDAV to work in Windows Vista.

Bottom line

The items above are certainly things that will make me think twice before I switch to Windows Vista on another machine or advise anyone else to do so. Some of these are why Vista is considered by many to have worse usability than XP.

In the next part I'll be listing a few items that have changed since the last version of Windows and that are very much subject to personal preference.

For reference, here's a list of links to the other parts of my Vista review:

• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 1: The Good)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 3: The So-so)
• Windows Vista (Part 4: Explorer)
• Windows Vista (Part 5: Power management)