Vista Woes

I recently purchased a new laptop preloaded with Vista (Home Premium). Given the choice I'd have preferred to stay with XP, but I had more than enough hardware to support it, so I thought "what the heck". Now I feel like I'm in one of those Mac commercials. Here are some of the issues I'm facing.
  • When I first booted up Vista, I made the mistake of setting what I intended to be my personal user ("Vinnie") as the Administrator. I was told this is not a good idea for security reasons so I renamed the Administrator account to "Admin" and created a new "regular" user reusing the "Vinnie" account name. On the surface everything appeared OK until I wanted to find the files associated with my account. There are user folders for "Vinnie" and "Vinnie2". The "Vinnie" folder corresponds to my Administrator account. The "Vinnie2" folder corresponds to my "regular" account. When I renamed my Administrator account, why didn't Vista also rename the user files associated with this user?!? Dumb and annoying. I made a mistake, shouldn't the software be able to help me recover?
  • I have a fairly popular Sansa mp3 player. When I connect it to Vista, I cannot manage all the music on the player. Many of the folders and files are not visible for some reason. I can see all the files if I reconnect the player to an XP machine. I can also access the files in Vista if I manually type in the folder and file names . What gives? In frustration, I accidentally "bricked" my player trying to resolve this issue. I'm hoping I can get the player back in working order with Rockbox.
  • On XP, I used Photoshop Elements to categorize my photos. Since Vista has a "Compatibility Mode" I was hopeful this wouldn't be a problem. (Insert manual buzzer here) Wrong!
    • I sill haven't been able to read in my Photoshop catalog on Vista (again it reads in with no problem on a XP machine with a clean Photoshop install)
    • The application has many odd display artifacts and Adobe Update causes the entire application to crash.
    • Every time I start the application I get a message telling me that I do not have Administrator privileges and some functionality will not work correctly. There is no way to disable this message, and running as Administrator poses additional annoyances (see below).
  • You can set up applications to run with Administrator privileges. Unfortunately every time you start the application you need to provide the Administrator credentials. Shouldn't there be a way to say:
    "Hey this application will not run how it's supposed to without Administrator privileges. I know this is not the ideal way to run, but there's no other way. I trust this program, so don't ask me for the cotton picking password everytime I need to run this app!"
    • I've also noticed that when I need to provide Admin access to install an Application, those credentials carry over to when I start the Application, placing any user information into the "Administrator" user folder instead of my "regular" user folder. Am I now running as the Administrator? Shouldn't the Administrator credentials only be needed approve the application install? What a joke! (This behavior goes away if I log out, then log in again.)

Apple is winning over the "average PC user", because their products simply work. I never hear an Apple (or iPod or iPhone) user complain of the problems I'm facing with my Vista PC or mp3 player, or cell phone. And again, it's why they can charge a premium for their products. For Apple it's not about the number of functions, it about the functionality.

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