I’m a Mac user. I’ve never been a fan of Windows because of security and the inconsistent look, but I recently decided to give it another chance. I decided to put away my bias and look at Vista fairly. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out very well, so here are 5 reasons why I will not be buying Vista.

1. Way Overpriced.
Seriously, I just checked out the prices and it looks like Vista is about the same price as a budget PC. Erm, I’m sorry but I don’t see the logic here.

No wonder they only sold 244 copies during the first two weeks in China, how do you expect people to buy something that is so exorbitantly priced?

2. The ‘Bling’ Factor.
I’m betting that during the development of Vista, a Microsoft employee must’ve looked at Mac OS X and remarked: “Gee, we need Longhorn to look better than this.”

They didn’t make it better looking, they went overboard with too many visual enhancements like gradients and shiny reflections. Sure it looks (slightly) better than XP, but it doesn’t actually improve my productivity.

3. A Snail Stuck in Jelly.
I saw this one coming. Even on relatively fast hardware (we’re talking Core 2 Duos), Vista still felt slower than the XP machines.

Sure you can tweak/customise/beat it to submission for more speed, but I’m talking about real-world usage. It’s a downgrade for the majority of users.

4. Cancel or Allow?
Does Microsoft take pleasure with annoying it’s users? I noticed several of these annoying questions immediately after I logged in. Certainly not cool at all.

Hah! Apple decided to ridicule Microsoft by pointing this out. If you haven’t seen the ad, you gotta see it (.MOV file).

5. Compatibility Woes.
It turns out that some drivers and applications won’t run properly in Vista. Which really makes you wonder what Vista can do that XP can’t.

Aero decided to take a toilet break whenever I ran WebCT (a tool for distributing lecture notes and what not). Yea, it was that bad.

You know, I really wanted Vista to “wow” me. I really wanted to see a big improvement. I really wanted to say “here’s a version of Windows that I can actually recommend”. But you know what? It hasn’t changed my thoughts one bit at all. In the words of Steve Jobs: “No matter how you spin it, ah, what can you say?”

This post is part of ProBlogger’s Group Writing Project.