Vista Follies

Now that I've been using Windows Vista for almost 6 months, I thought I'd vent a little on nits that I have had to endure every day:

1. My work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) runs Windows Vista Business which I take it home every day. I have a 24" Dell Widescreen monitor connected a Dell Docking station at work with a resolution of 1920x1200 and a 20" Dell Widescreen monitor with a resolution of 1680x1050 connected directly to the laptop at home. So every day, when I go to work and connect my laptop to the 24" external monitor, the resolution it gets is 1680x1050. Every. Single. Day. I have to adjust the resolution manually to be 1920x1200. And this is after I shut down my computer whenever I take it home or to work. Trying this on standby is altogether another disaster. And of course, there are no Vista drivers for these two monitors on Dell's website. Go ahead look for it.
   
2. I use my laptop to do a lot of voice calls and I have to tweak my microphone "volume" a number of times. First off, they have hidden the microphone volume so deep its impossible to find. There's something called "levels" now which if you try to adjust for any recording device, it just ignores whatever you do and goes back to the defaults (which is pretty high).
3. The windows task bar magically realigns itself (even though I have it locked, remember) to a minuscule size randomly some days. I have to reposition it to a reasonable size.
4. Don't even start me on network configuration. I have a wired and a wireless connection (as probably most every laptop now does) and Vista for the life of it cannot figure out what's going on when I switch from one to another. To add to the troubles, Vista lets you name each connection (for e.g, "Work", "Starbucks" etc). But the problem is even though you've already named a connection, when you reconnect to the same network, it now identifies it as a "new" network and asks you to name it. Again. And almost always, it doesn't connect to the WiFi network of your choice (when you are connecting it for the first time) the first time you try. You have to "repair" the connection and then it connects. For MS' credit, the "repair" actually repairs the connection, so to speak. But I shouldn't have to do that.

Even though these are small nitpicks, it shows how much attention Microsoft has paid to these small but very important details: very little.