The Devil Wears Eyeglasses

Today is Valentine's Day, and I'll tell you what, I am not feeling the love. That's not to say I'm not getting love from my beautiful wife and darling baby boy. No, I got that. I'm not feeling the love from Bill Gates. As of this posting, it is my personal opinion that Vista sucks. Let me explain.

This month I upgraded all my home computing tech, thus it all came with Vista installed. I figure this is great, because I was led to believe that Vista would make your computing experience easier and more intuitive. If "doesn't work" is how you would define easy and intuitive, then Microsoft has succeeded. I admit I am only moderately tech savvy, so if you are savvier then you may see my errors as I proceed. But, for now, I prefer to blame the software.

One of Vista's new features is Windows Easy Transfer, which allows you to move all your settings and folders from your old computer to the new computer. In fact, there's an Easy Transfer cable you can purchase to do this. Hooray, I think. This means I won't have to spend an estimated 15+ hours copying my scads of music and photo data with my 8x DVD burner. This will rule.

On the outset it all looks very easy. Simple USB cable. Easy Transfer Wizard right there on Vista. A disk to download the Easy Transfer Wizard on my old XP computer. Easy. Intuitive. And for the most part I had the transfer initiated in minutes. This is great. Then it went to hell.

I have a lot of music and photos, so the transfer takes a long time. I check in periodically, and as the evening wears on I'm about 3/4 of the way through. Then I it doesn't seem to be actively moving anything, and there's a not-to-auspicious icon of a crossed-out USB connector in the corner. Sure enough, the Wizard shows that one of the files is being used (I don't buy this), and it has to stop the transfer. There are no other available options, so as I close out the Wizard promptly asks me if I really want to stop the transfer. Well, you haven't given me any other options here, have you? I click "No" and go back and check if I missed anything, but it still says I'm SOL. So I close the Wizard.

Now, the Easy Transfer Wizard's messages gave me the distinct impression that none of my files transferred and I was going to have to start from ground zero. Fine, I think, I'll just start over and hope for the best. Maybe what transferred over is in some sort of Files and Settings Limbo, waiting to be freed into the new Vista Paradise by the rest of their un-transferred brethren. I start the transfer again and I'm given the option of resuming a transfer in process. Excellent, I think, I can pick up where I left off. Then it asks me for a key provided by the old computer. There is no key. I've seen nothing from either computer in the way of a key. Great. I start the whole thing over again and go to bed.

Miraculously, the next morning the transfer is complete. This is awesome. As I try to figure out where all the data went (Vista Windows Explorer's layout is, at least at this point, very unfamiliar) I start to notice something very bad. That 3/4 of data I thought hadn't made it over to the new computer had. Even better, the Easy Transfer Wizard didn't write over the matching files during the second transfer, but instead attached a "(1)" to the end of the file names and made another copy. I have lots of music and photo files. Now I have twice as much.

Vista also features System Restore, so I figured this could be my salvation. Restore my system and start from scratch. Not so much. It sort of resets your system, except for any data or settings you transferred. Fat lot of good that does me (and, as it turns out, it bombed anyway for some reason I have chosen to block from my memory). There's no way in hell I'm going to go though and manually delete all the dups, so I decide to delete as much of the data transferred I can find and do it again. Which I do. And the wizard chokes again at about 3/4 complete. This is where the swearing really starts.

The Easy Transfer Wizard is neither easy, nor does it really transfer well, and I've concluded that it is one of those evil Wizards, like Saruman, who you go to for help and he turns on you and leaves you stranded on the roof of his tower. You know the type. At this point I figure I'll just cut my losses, figure out what data didn't transfer, network my computers and transfer the rest that way.

To be fair, I have networked my computers successfully, at least in terms of getting them access to the Internet. (Well, one computer is convinced that the connection is not secure, which it is. I think.) But when I look at my network, it (Vista, my computer, whatever) doesn't show the other computers connected, which naturally means I can't go to those other files and transfer them, and at this point I have given up, for now. I've been away from my email and Quicken for too long, so I go to set them up instead. Hey, guess what else doesn't load successfully in Vista?

On top of it all, I've got a cold. Bleh!