So,

Can someone give me a list as to why Vista sucks?

I'm using it now. I had to update some software to the Vista-optimized versions. Which is no big deal actually.

Other than that everything works fine.

I run a student license, so money was no reason for me not to upgrade.

Live with Vista for a few months, and everything will become apparant.  Your attitude is the exact attitude I approached Vista with back in March, and now I'm doing everything I can to get away from Vista.

It seems wierd that I was a major pro-Microsoftie just a few short months ago.  Now I'm downgrading to XP, and I'll probably be switching to Linux if they ever fix any of their major issues.

My list of "This really Sucks" for vista:

1. Explorer folders have the favorites/folders sidebar thing enabled at all times, with no way to disable it. I don't use IE, so there's no favorites. The folders view is replicated by the nav bar along the top, so why the double space usage?
2. Explorer folders have the 'tasks' bar, which change based on what Vista thinks the folder's contents are. I'm not going to be emailing my files (or print, or burning, or organizing, or ..... ad nauseum) so often that a dedicated task bar is necessary. If I want to burn some stuff, I'll fire up Nero. If I want to view a file, I'll double click (or right-click and select which app). Of course, this task bar cannot be removed/disabled/moved.
3. IPv6 is enabled by default, and disabling it (or at least unbinding it from a NIC) seems to kill off IPv4. While it's nice they've got IPv6 in there, I'm not running IPv6 at home, nor is my ISP offering it, so there's no point in having it enabled.
4. The Recycle bin is uber-slow when doing mass deletions. It spends more time calculating time estimates and preparing to delete than the actual deletion does.
   
5. 64bit Vista is still lacking a great many drivers... Any older hardware is likely to never get drivers. Byebye Bluetooth dongle and scanner.
   
6. 32bit apps inexplicably get VERY slow at random times, the only solution is to reboot. No clear pattern as to why it occurs. It just does.
7. The standard games have been given new looks, and are DirectX enabled, making them a lot bulkier than before.
   

My likes so far:

1. The sound mixer applet now has per-application settings, and can remember them. No more cranking up the volume because a video is far too quiet, only to have your IM or mail notifier blast out your ears when an event occurs.
2. The clock applet now pops up a calendar you can navigate around, which BY DEFAULT does not adjust the system clock. There's an extra step for that now.
3. Device manager is now a member of the control panel again, and not buried under a tab+button in the System CPL
   
4. The Recycle bin now handles file deletions from within applications (ie: delete an image from inside ACDsee, it's in the Recycle bin)
   
5. Once you kill off the Aero crap, revert to classic Explorer folders (minus Dislikes #1 & 2 above), and the classic start menu, Vista doesn't look much different from 9x/2k/XP
6. The standard games (and the new ones) are now DirectX enabled and fully resizable, so no more squinting at microscopic cards or mines on very large screens. You can also save the games, in case that critical round of Solitaire is taking longer than your coffee break.

Overall Vista ain't so bad, but it isn't worth the price they're charging for it at this time. Maybe in a few years when there's more DirectX 10 hardware and games available, it'll make sense. But really, for 99.99999% of people out there. Vista is an overpriced XP service pack.

If they hadn't spent the last 2 billion years developing all those features that were cut from the shipping version, it might have definitely been worth it. 

MarcB:

1. Explorer folders have the favorites/folders sidebar thing enabled at all times, with no way to disable it. I don't use IE, so there's no favorites. The folders view is replicated by the nav bar along the top, so why the double space usage?

By "replicated", do you mean the single folder-thread in the dropdown? That's a rather useless navigator, because you can only go UP. Or am I describing something that's totally redesigned in Vista?

How can you live without the full folder tree in easy reach or plain view?

I can agree with everything else. :)

By replicated, I mean... replicated. The nav bar along the top is basically a flattened view of the folder list on the left. Notice the little \/ down arrows beside each folder in the nav bar. You can click down on each of those to see the other folders stored at the same level as the one you're clicking the button on.

I much prefer this flattened view than the totally useless tree view. Go into any folder with a largeish number of sub-folders, and you lose all sense of where you are in the tree, because there's 12 feet worth of folders to scroll through in a 4 inch space. The flattened view gives you some nice breacrumbs.

What would've been nice is if they'd put the crumbs into the window title bar instead of wasting space inside the window. I've got 2 large 20" monitors, so space isn't exactly an issue, But when you've got a ton of windows open, and each explorer window (at the sizes I keep them at) wastes around 20% of the realestate on these useless "features", it starts pissing me off.

I can back out of a folder and down into another one much quicker with backspace and some judicious keystrokes than it takes me to reach for the mouse and click around.

 

Ice^^Heat:

Can someone give me a list as to why Vista sucks?

I can objectively say that Vista is complete garbage. I have dealt with every Microsoft OS since its inception, and this is by far the worst implementation.

1) The marketing - came out late, was way over-hyped with absolutely no justification whatsoever, and Microsoft should be paying people to use it, not the other way around.

2) Application Incompatibility - if you happened to upgrade from XP, which can only be classified as a nightmare experience, most applications that I was running did not work after the fact. This included firewall software, CD burning software, and scanning software to name a few.

3) XP to Vista Upgrade was Horrendous -  as mentioned in point 2, this was the most lengthy and screwy upgrade I have ever performed with a Microsoft product. It literally took 2 days to get everything "more or less" functioning in a semi-decent way. In the end you feel like you've been through hell.

4) Pop-up annoyances  - if you've run Vista, you know what I'm talking about. It's first order of business to locate and disable this stupidity. I can imagine for the novice user, this would really suck.

5) The new Vista view sucks compared to the XP "classic" view - not that the XP view was so great, but I imagine most users will default back to the easier to navigate XP view.

6) Disk defragmenter is so lame it's not funny - the new defrag doesn't give you a progress bar, so you're left wondering what's going on and how long it will take to complete. The estimate they give you is "a few hours to a few days". I have let it run and it completed 2 days later.

7) All you really gain is a 3-D "switch between windows" feature - this sums it up. Vista gives you the ability to throw up some semi-3D windows and alt+tab through them. Like their ad says: WOW.

heh, I did an upgrade from XP to Vista to. Was a disaster.

Now I did a clean install, and now everything works great.

Upgrading sucks anyway, old installs are usually full of garbage. Clean install is much better.

CPound:

I can objectively say that Vista is complete garbage. I have dealt with every Microsoft OS since its inception, and this is by far the worst implementation.

What, even DOS 4.0? 

I've been running Vista for about three months now. I needed a new PC since mine was five years old and could not run Command & Conquer 3, and so I decided to get Vista Home Premium. I tried out the 32-bit version, and then I tried out the 64-bit version for a month each before finally validating the 64-bit version. My biggest complaint is with Explorer. It never remembers my view settings, it always starts in My Documents, it's got "favourites" that I can't get rid of, and it's got this weird automatic horizontal-scrolling thing that I can't stand. I didn't know that I could set it back to the XP way, and I'm going to look into that as soon as I get home.

As for the other complaints, I haven't noticed any problems running 32-bit apps. Most of my apps are 32-bit games, and they run fine (with the exception of when nVidia releases bad drivers). No slowdowns, no incompatibility. One app I'm running (Shove-It) is designed for Windows 95 and works fine in Vista 64-bit. I like the view, too. The start menu and taskbar and window decorations don't look like they were drawn with a crayon like they do in Windows XP. I hardly use the start menu at all, so I can't really say that it's better or worse in functionality than XP's.

I'm probably the only person in the world who willingly has UAC turned on. I love this feature to bits — in fact it's my favourite Vista feature. It lets me keep tabs on what's trying to run. When Adobe Acrobat Reader somehow manages to turn itself on even when I'm not looking at a PDF, Vista tells me that it's up to something so that I can squash it. I can't tell you how good it feels to squash Reader like that.

Another thing I love to bits is how it automatically updates but doesn't tell me about it until I'm restarting. XP's automatic updates would get the update and run it, and then tell you at every step. Vista gets the updates in the background but doesn't give any notice of it other than a special symbol on the off button. When you shut down, Vista applies the updates. This guarantees that the updates won't be run at an inconvenient time: I'm already restarting after all.

I'm happy with Vista, though I'm not sure if it was worth its cost.

Welbog:

I needed a new PC since mine was five years old and could not run Command & Conquer 3

You bought a new box just to run C&C3? That must have been a disappointment.

asuffield:

Welbog:

I needed a new PC since mine was five years old and could not run Command & Conquer 3

You bought a new box just to run C&C3? That must have been a disappointment.

CPound:

7) All you really gain is a 3-D "switch between windows" feature - this sums it up. Vista gives you the ability to throw up some semi-3D windows and alt+tab through them. Like their ad says: WOW.

This is what I feared.

MarcB:

1. Explorer folders have the favorites/folders sidebar thing enabled at all times, with no way to disable it. I don't use IE, so there's no favorites. The folders view is replicated by the nav bar along the top, so why the double space usage?

1. "Organize" - "Layout" - "Navigation Pane" -- Is that what you're referring to?  Yeah, it's on by default, but it's pretty easy to turn off.  Just so you know...

If it hadn't come preinstalled on this laptop, I wouldn't use it.  If I could have gotten a laptop with XP, I wouldn't have gotten this one.  When I tried installing XP on it, LOTS of drivers were missing.  I found most of them and am currently running a dual-boot system (I've got Vista, it was included in the price of the laptop, might as well use it...), but having to assure the computer that I really intended to do what I asked it to do gets a little old after a while...

Ice^^Heat:

But why does UAC popup everytime I want to start a perfectly harmless program???

Probably because your "perfectly harmless program" is doing things that it shouldn't (all the way back to XP), like write to the Program Files directory tree or to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry.
 

VS2005 gets UAC Prompts

Office 2007 gets none.

Isn't there a way to "trust" VS2005???

Welbog:

Another thing I love to bits is how it automatically updates but doesn't tell me about it until I'm restarting. XP's automatic updates would get the update and run it, and then tell you at every step. Vista gets the updates in the background but doesn't give any notice of it other than a special symbol on the off button. When you shut down, Vista applies the updates. This guarantees that the updates won't be run at an inconvenient time: I'm already restarting after all.

Well, I have XP on 'ask me first' and all I get is a small icon in the tray. I click on it, select the updates I want, agree to never be asked again about the ones I didn't want, and then it downloads them. Then, when I reboot/shutdown they are automatically installed. I've never used the all-automatic setting, but can it really be that 'automatic' is more annoying than 'manual'?

The only thing I never do is to click on the icon again after the updates are downloaded, because if you install them it will ask you every 5 minutes to reboot, which is of course fixed by not closing the box and moving it out of the visible desktop area..
 

ShadowPhoenix:

If you wanna see some cool 3D effects, get compiz/beryl in linux and amaze yourself :D

And then do yourself and the world a favour and uninstall it again. There's nothing quite so offensive and absurd as running your video card at full power just to render a normal desktop - it uses huge amounts of electricity for no apparent reason (that's probably the single most power-hungry component in your system, and it would be more or less switched off if you didn't have the unnecessary 3D effects running all the time).

It's like somebody running their electric fire in summer because they like the way it looks.
 

TDC:

The only thing I never do is to click on the icon again after the updates are downloaded, because if you install them it will ask you every 5 minutes to reboot, which is of course fixed by not closing the box and moving it out of the visible desktop area..

Except it always pops up in the middle of when you're typing, and it has the YES! KILL MY WORK PLZ! button activated, and then you hit space.
 

asuffield:

ShadowPhoenix:

If you wanna see some cool 3D effects, get compiz/beryl in linux and amaze yourself :D

And then do yourself and the world a favour and uninstall it again. There's nothing quite so offensive and absurd as running your video card at full power just to render a normal desktop - it uses huge amounts of electricity for no apparent reason (that's probably the single most power-hungry component in your system, and it would be more or less switched off if you didn't have the unnecessary 3D effects running all the time).

Aye! 

TDC:

The only thing I never do is to click on the icon again after the updates are downloaded, because if you install them it will ask you every 5 minutes to reboot, which is of course fixed by not closing the box and moving it out of the visible desktop area..
 

There's a way to change the settings to that it only asks you once an day.