Worst User Experience Ever – Vista

My next computer is very likely to be a Mac at this rate. For every feature of Vista that I like (native search), some idiotic thing just pisses me right off.

Tonight, it’s iTunes on Vista. Now, before you get all bent out of shape that it’s the fault of the app developer, I gotta go with this being Vista’s fault.

First, I’ve lost my iTunes library no fewer than 3 times since moving to Vista 4 months ago. It’s a pain in the ass to recovery from that because something on Vista makes iTunes take forever to write library changes (no idea what). I could easily chalk that up to an iTunes fault (and, actually lean that way), but iTunes works on my XP boxen just fine at the same version; what’s so frackin’ hard about Vista?

But tonight, tonight it’s Vista’s fault. As I continue to reload my entire library of videos into iTunes–again–I noticed that some videos I newly converted won’t play on my Vista box. They played fine on the Mac that made them, on the XP box I use at work, and on another XP box of a colleague.

After getting a Quicktime error on a file I know worked on this Vista box as recently as Monday, I hit Google. And, lo and behold, I found this:

As soon as I “Safely Removed” the USB FlashDrive, thereby turning off “ReadyBoost”, al 14 files loaded properly into iTunes, and played properly in Quicktime. [source]

Wouldn’t yah know it, I had plugged in a USB drive for the ReadyBoost benefits just this week. I unload the USB drive, double-click a file that had just failed on me and BAM it works.

That is, frankly, absolutely fucking stupid. What does or could ReadyBoost have to do with playing video files on Quicktime? Anyone?

So, now ReadyBoost is worthless to me, I still have to reload my entire library in iTunes, and I’m pissed. Working the checklist of new features in Vista, they’re not really helping me out much. ReadyBoost? Unusable. UAC? Please; disabled. Sidebar? Aside from a clock and the weather, the gadgets are worthless (and development is anemic).

Congratulations Microsoft; when I have the money, you’ve likely lost another long-time customer.