P.1. Why Am I Annoyed?

Imagine a windowless room in a nondescript office building. Inoffensive tan carpet lines the floors, fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, and 20 seated Microsoft employees flank a rectangular folding table in the center of the room. On the table rests a Windows PC, and at its helm, a slack-jawed cipher punches blindly at the controls in a vain attempt to carry out a task requested by the team leader.

"OK, here's the next exercise: find a picture of a badger on the Internet and print it out on that printer there," says the leader.

The observers—members of Microsoft's Usability Research Group—diligently note each click, keypress, and hesitation, hoping they'll learn the answer to the industry's big secret: why do so many people find computers difficult to use?

Over the years, Microsoft has uncovered many startling facts about PC users with this system, and the software has been changed accordingly. For instance, people new to computers apparently have a hard time with the concept of overlapping windows. (Did I say "startling"? I meant "idiotic.") So, Microsoft spent six years designing a "Glass" interface for Windows Vista with translucent borders that sort of show stuff underneath. Of course, most people new to PCs figure out the concept of stacking windows after about 10 minutes of fiddling, so is this actually a solution to a genuine usability problem, or just glitzy eye candy included to give those still using XP a compelling reason to upgrade?

Here's another one: lots of people seem to get lost searching through long menus for the tools they need, so once again, Microsoft snapped into action. The team's first attempt was "personalized menus"—a feature found in earlier versions of Windows (including XP) and Microsoft Office—which caused about half the items in a menu to vanish so nobody could find them. In Windows Vista, Microsoft took a different tack and removed the menus altogether. The good news is that you'll no longer get lost looking through menus. Of course, you won't be able to find anything, either.

Or take the fact that, for years, people have been complaining about the time it takes to load Windows. Rather than making the operating system leaner and cleaner so that it starts faster, Microsoft's designers have continued to add features and complexity to the software, which results in longer load times. The solution? Replace the Shut Down button in the Start menu with a Sleep button, so once Windows starts, it'll stay loaded in memory even when you shut it off. Thereafter, it'll take only a few seconds to get your desktop back.

Truth be told, features like Sleep have been around for years, but they've always sat on the sidelines, waiting for inquisitive people to discover them. But thanks to Vista, Sleep is now the main dish, which means Windows should start much faster now—whether you're the inquisitive type or not—and this should make a lot of people happy. The downside, of course, is that it takes a constant supply of electricity to keep Windows loaded in memory, causing your PC to suck power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... even when you're not using it. This means shorter-lasting laptop batteries, higher electricity bills, and more pollution from the power plants that now have to power millions of sleeping Vista PCs.

What most people don't know is that Sleep is actually a hybrid of the old Standby and Hibernate power-saving modes, which means you can now completely power off your PC and still get it to load quickly. Once again, only the inquisitive—you, presumably—will be in the know, leaving the masses to leave their PCs on all night.

Probably the most substantive change in Vista's interface is the prominence of the Search tool. Rather than being a separate window, it's now permanently lodged in the Start menu and at the top of every Explorer window. What's more, Windows now invisibly indexes most of your data, making search results more or less instantaneous (a feat possible in earlier versions of Windows only with free add-on desktop search software).

Unfortunately, that speed comes at a cost—namely, that your searches may be out-of-date or incomplete, and you won't even know it. In some cases, you can search a folder full of JPEG images for *.jpg and get absolutely nothing, or worse, a partial listing with no warning that it may be incomplete. And when you do get the search results you want, there's no telling whether or not your favorite Details columns will be present since Vista seems incapable of saving your preferences from one session to the next.

In short, the new Search feature shows promise, but its competence is limited by a company that values marketable features over usable ones.

Hundreds of design decisions are made this way. Take content protection, Vista's copy-protection initiative for so-called "premium content" like high-definition movies from Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs. According to Microsoft's standards, software and hardware manufacturers are supposed to disable "premium content" across all interfaces that don't provide copy protection. One such interface is the S/PDIF digital audio port—usually in the form of a TOSlink optical plug—that comes on most high-end audio cards. Since S/PDIF doesn't support copy protection—meaning that you could theoretically plug it into another PC and rip the soundtrack off an HD movie—Vista requires that your TOSlink plug be disabled whenever you play back that HD movie on your PC. As a result, you'll only be able to use your analog audio outputs when watching HD content, and that expensive sound card you just bought is now trash. Why would Microsoft hobble an important feature? For you, the consumer? Of course not. Vista's content-protection feature is intended to appease piracy-wary movie studios, so Microsoft won't be left behind as the home theater industry finds new ways to rake in cash. And ironically, Microsoft boasts "content protection" as a feature of Vista.

Would Microsoft be making decisions like these if it had to compete fairly for your business? After Europe's second-highest court upheld a ruling that Microsoft had abused its market power and stifled innovation, Neelie Kroes, the European Union competition commissioner, stated that "the court has confirmed the commission's view that consumers are suffering at the hands of Microsoft."

So that leaves us lowly Vista users with a choice: do we continue to suffer with Windows' shortcomings, or take matters into our own hands?