Last night I passed the first week ownership mark of Windows Vista Home Premium. The experience overall hasn’t been very positive. I’m sure some of the problem is Gateway but this is my only Vista machine and thus my only Vista customer experience. It’s worn me down, literally. Yesterday was one of the most frustrating computing days I’ve had in a long time.

Last night I was unsuccessful in several attempts to install the Zune software so I could listen to my Zune Pass library (that we’re paying for). This irritated me enough to go in and cancel the Zune membership. Yeah, overreaction on my part, but I felt the urge to do something productive and that seemed very satisfying. I’ll probably resubscribe because Zune works great on my regular XP Pro machine, although I was enjoying listening to Pandora through Firefox on the Vista machine last night.

Now let me summarize some major things I’ve tried to do on the Vista machine in the first week and met with disappointing results:

- played World of Warcraft (sound quality and video card issues)
- Second Life works much better than WoW, but still throws video card errors.
- listen to music on Zune (couldn’t install the software after multiple attempts)
- Watch movies through Wal-mart Video Download Service (I was able to watch the first time we downloaded and ever since only receive error messages)

Yesterday I broke in some new shoes and thought about how a new OS can generate similar feelings. The thing about shoes is in the beginning they are tight fit and unyielding but then they get into that comfort zone and you feel good wearing them.

That’s my current feelings on Vista. I’ve spent a week breaking Vista in and so far feeling mostly uncomfortable like a brand new pair of shoes. Almost a little painful.

It worked ok for blogging last night, but didn’t really see any major benefit over using the systems we already have. I’m not sure Microsoft chose the right slogan for Vista with the whole ‘wow’ thing. In retrospect, I’m very glad I didn’t do any Vista beta testing and really glad I didn’t attempt a Vista upgrade.

Starting to ponder possibly taking the machine back to the store and getting my money back. Clearly, I’m an dissatisfied customer and there comes a point where it’s time to take the pole out of the water and head for a different fishing hole. Will give it some more time though because there are still a bunch of things I want to mess around with including some video work.

I’m hoping the break-in process passes soon though. Anybody else not overly “wow’d” by their new Vista powered machine?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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