Windows 7: Seventh heaven?

By the time Service Pack 1 was released in February 2008, Vista was much improved; but its public perception can never fully recover. Further, the Vista user interface does bear signs of haste.

When blogger Long Zheng started a website enabling users to vote on their most hated inconsistencies (www.aerotaskforce.com), it soon filled with complaints about issues such as the way Explorer decides to display the contents of a folder as music, or images, even when most of the files are of a different type, and hiding useful information such as file size and date.

Rush job
The truth is that Vista was indeed rushed, mainly because Microsoft spent years going down the wrong track with a version of Windows built more deeply on the .Net Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), work that had to be undone and reset.

Further time was spent trying to improve Windows XP’s security with Service Pack 2, reducing the resources available to build Vista. Vista ended up very late, and one consequence was that third-party vendors did not have enough time to create high-quality drivers.

Another Vista problem is the security feature called User Account Control (UAC), which is switched on by default. This is widely disliked, because it prompts the user with one or more annoying dialogues when they perform certain tasks or install and update applications.

The real purpose of User Account Control is to solve a long-standing Windows legacy problem: it does not properly separate system files, application files, and user data, which makes it insecure and hard to manage.

Although Microsoft long ago laid down guidelines intended to fix this, too many third-party applications ignored them, and even some Microsoft applications do not behave as they should.

This is why many Windows users still work while logged on with full administrator rights over their machine, making it an easy target for malware.

UAC in effect reduces those rights while still enabling badly behaved applications to run, though there can still be compatibility problems.

The bottom line is that UAC is a key part of Microsoft’s Windows strategy, but for the user it is nothing more than annoying; it is a usability burden rather than a benefit. Windows 7 reduces the impact of UAC on the user while preserving most of its value.