Bad Vista Experiences

I'm starting to think that neither Vista nor Microsoft is ready for prime time.

I've been "beta testing" the public release (Build 5384) for awhile now, off-and-on, and thought I'd make use of the holiday weekend to play with it more.

Bad idea.

Long story short, there's a "Release Candidate" out there for Vista, but I sure can't figure out how to get it. As a registered "beta 2" person, you'd think maybe they'd tell me about it. But, no. And when I go to the Microsoft site to download it, it says that the beta is closed.

So, I'm stuck with Build 5384, which has issues.

After fighting with graphics problems since the very start -- the mouse pointer shows up bright white, but the rest of the screen is a dim grey, like it's half-faded; ATI's brand new drivers for the Release Candidate seem to have fixed it in my beta -- I'm now stuck with Remote Access problems.

Long story short, there's no way I can connect to this machine remotely. Instructions on the 'net don't do any good because Microsoft has apparently changed titles and names of control panel stuff. (A blog post entitled XP remote desktop into Vista seems hopeful, and there's a suggestion to change "Control Panel > Network Connections > right click your network card > Configure > Share > Settings". The problem? In my build, there isn't a "Network Connections" control panel. There are several network-related control panels, none of them named that, and none of them have that kind of functionality. The only think I can think is that this was there in an earlier build and has now been replaced with the "public" or "private" network choice that I get to make. I've tried it both ways -- no luck.

I can't get a Remote Assistance invitation to work -- it goes out but the connection from the Vista machine is refused.

And what started this whole thing was my attempt to get VNC working, but apparently Microsoft broke that as well when they "secured" Vista.

If you read Vista reviews on the 'net you'll see complaints about how many clicks it takes to accomplish anything... and they're absolutely right. It looks like Microsoft has "secured" Vista by breaking anything useful and making you triple-confirm that you really want to use any of the remaining functionality.

As soon as I hit "Publish" on this post, I'm booting into Ubuntu!

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