I've been using Vista in one form or another since mid-2006 when I first began beta-testing it. I've seen hardware compatibility decrease as successive betas came out, and then increase again as some manufacturers got their Vista driver acts together. I've used Vista on decent hardware, with plenty of RAM, so I haven't seen the slowness that so many users complain about. There are enough differences between XP and Vista that it's taken quite a while to accustom myself to doing things the "Vista way."
Once I made the transition, though, I decided that I wanted to move into the Vista era. My main desktop machine, and my notebook, both run Vista as primary OS (I have dual-boot capability, so I can always retrace my steps to XP if necessary). As I've used Vista more and more, however, it's the little nits that are becoming more and more glaring. It's kind of like buying a really nice, really expensive car, and then finding that the gearshift handle comes off in your hand once or twice a week. Not a major thing, really, but after a while you begin to wonder about the quality of the rest of the expensive car you're driving.
One of Vista's new things is the Sidebar. I've been using Rainmeter, Rainlendar, Google Desktop, and the Yahoo Widget Engine in addition to the Sidebar on various computers for the last couple of years, and have gotten used to the functionality that these things provide. Rainmeter and Rainlendar are hugely customizable and have a great number of skins available if you don't like the way they look. Google Desktop has a large number of gadgets available, but is a bit less customizable than I'd like (for intance, would it be _that_ hard to have the gadget opacity user-adjustable?). The Yahoo Widget Engine was really useful to me until their last major upgrade; at that point, it became an unstable mess that proceeded to screw up everything I'd gotten used to, and it was unceremoniously uninstalled. I have not put it (or a successor) back on that particular computer. Finally, there's the Vista Sidebar.
As part of the latest and greatest from Redmond, you'd expect the thing to be nearly bullet-proof. You'd be wrong. About once or twice a week on my notebook, and a _little_ less frequently on my desktop, I have to re-order the gadgets that I've set up to use in the Sidebar. Sometimes one is missing altogether; generally, rebooting will put it back in the Sidebar, but relocated. I've never had to re-order the gadgets in the Google Desktop; they just pop-up when I boot, and that's the end of it. I've looked (so far in vain) for any way that I could lock the Sidebar gadgets into place so that this increasingly annoying bug doesn't recur. It's gotten to the point that I've turned off the Sidebar on my notebook; I just am tired of having to mess with it again.
So, here's what I put to Microsoft--why can't your programmers and developers give us what others seem to be able to deliver? Why isn't the Sidebar just as dependable as it should be--set it and forget it? Until that state of affairs happens, I'll wonder more and more about the rest of Vista--is it _really_ as good as it appears to be, or are there other glitches and gotchas waiting to surface and make my life difficult?
The work is never done, the job is never complete, there's always another question to ask, there's always another hill to climb...