WARNING: What follows is a rant. If you don’t feel like listening to me complain about my problems with Windows Vista, you should probably just skip this one.

I’ve been using Windows Vista for…oohhh…I dunno, about a year now or so, something like that. The experience has been…uuummm…OK. There are some things about it that I like, and definitely some things about it that I don’t like. One thing that I will say for certain though, is that there is one thing that I don’t like about it SO much, that it may just end up being the deciding factor of whether or not I continue using Vista or not.

It is absolutely appalling to me that, having been in the operating system business for what, roughly 30 years or so now, that Microsoft hasn’t figure out a way to gracefully handle system crashes. Now, understand where I’m coming from…I’ve been working with computers long enough to have come to accept the fact that, things go wrong. Crashes happen. I can live with that. I just can’t seem to figure out how, after doing this for so long, that they can’t seem to figure out a more graceful way to handle it than this:

Are you serious? I’m doing something so common and innocent as watching a YouTube video, something goes wrong with a driver somewhere or something, and THAT is the best you can come up with? Its bad enough that it happens as often as it does, but you’d think they could at least come up with a more elegant way of breaking the news to the user. Actually, it seems to me that they should be able to handle it without completely shutting the system down altogether (I dunno, I’m not an OS developer…its probably more complicated than I think), but worst case scenario, at least handle it a little more nicely. It can be done…others do it.

I really don’t think I’m asking all that much either. I mean, other systems that have been around the block a LOT fewer times that Microsoft has have come up with a much more friendly way of easing you down gently:

So why can’t Microsoft get it right? For the record, I’m really kind of tired of it. I didn’t have this happen to me NEARLY as often when I was using Windows XP. Should I switch back?

Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is supposed to be available to the general public sometime around the middle of next month. I plan on installing it as soon as is physically possible for me. I’m very excited, and to be honest, have VERY high hopes for it. I really hope that the number of blue screens that I see post SP1 drops dramatically, if not completely. If not…if I continue to see Vista crash as much as I have over the past year (even on known good hardware with known good drivers), I’ll be switching back to XP. I really, really want Microsoft to get it right, but I can’t continue to put up with mediocrity, and right now, in my experience, that’s what Windows Vista is for me.