Outside of a few graphic design classes, I’ve never really used an Apple OS. From what I understand, it makes things very, very simple. I imagine the “goal” people at Microsoft had in mind when they set out to make certain “enhanced usability” tools for their operating systems was to match the Apple OS usability. “People say our OS sucks compared to Apple’s,” the Microsoft execs would say, “you, guy who has been working on windows his entire life and never taken a software usability course, fix it!” What we ended up getting were things that touted themselves as usable and helpful, but that didn’t quite work, and were *so* usable that you couldn’t turn them off if you wanted to.

In Vista this means that when I was searching my music folder for something I ended up getting 0 results for something I knew I owned. I clicked advanced search and saw that by default I wasn’t searching anything that wasn’t indexed. Indexing was a system hog in XP so I had turned it off in Vista. “Ok,” I told myself, “I give, I’ll try turning on indexing.” And so I tried. But when I try to turn it on I just get an error for every single file that it’s trying to index, stating “access denied.” When I hit “cancel,” Windows then hilariously thinks indexing is turned on.

So far the one thing Vista has done that has impressed me is make it so then I hit F2 to rename a file, it doesn’t include the extension by default. That’s it. That’s the only thing.