It’s funny how little things can really get under your skin and annoy you; at work, I use a combination of Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server for development and day to day work which is fine, but as I use Vista at home I find that I miss the UI enhancements more and more.
Unlike a lot of people, I seem to have had a rosy experience with Vista; maybe because I didn’t have unrealistic expectations about the OS (I wouldn’t dream of running it on some of the older machines I’ve seen it shoehorned into), and I’ve had some reasonably up to date hardware to run it on. The only real issues that I had with the OS were very early in its life, when some of the third-party drivers for my hardware devices were less than stable – my Hauppauge TV capture card was a prime example. Nowadays though I struggle to find any such issues, even though I’m running the x64 version of Vista.
My particular bugbear at the moment is the XP (and Windows 2003) Start Menu; I’ve got so used to the convenience of the Search function in Vista that not having it available is like having an arm tied behind my back. The amount of times I find myself instinctively pressing the Windows key and then typing “Visual” to find Visual Studio on my development box is ridiculous.
What’s even more annoying is that my work laptop was originally purchased with Vista, which was when downgraded to XP by the IT department...