At least I'm not the only one...

First it was reviewers,

Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town dump. The new slogan is: "The 'Wow' Starts Now," and Microsoft touts new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh. But as with every previous version, there's no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out. [More]

Now it's users who are incensed by the poor performance of MS Vista. Including one really important user - the US Government.

Citing concerns over cost and compatibility, the top technology official at the federal Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on all in-house computer upgrades to Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, as well as Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, according to a memo obtained Friday by InformationWeek. [More]

My own travails are documented here and here.

I may yet wind up with a Mac...

Update: One reason Vista may perform so poorly is the extraordinary encryption built in to prevent copying movies. In satisfying the entertainment industry, usability was the first oxen gored.

They were surprising: it seemed Vista was riddled with security precautions that had little to do with enhancing the customer's experience or making a PC perform better, or even making it more secure from external attack. Instead, they were all about preventing movies and music being copied and distributed on home computers.

In an apparent capitulation to the demands of Hollywood studios and music moguls obsessed by piracy, Vista was packed with "digital rights management" (DRM) "features" that could cripple a PC's performance as a media player at the merest whiff of copyright infringement, reducing screen resolution and sound quality or stopping playback altogether. And these hyper-sensitive features seemed to have the potential to over-react, blocking movies or music that had been legitimately purchased or created by the computer owner. [more]

I don't think this story is over yet.