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All good things come to an end. Your charming local pub is turned into a plastic, could-be-anywhere chain pub with piped music and surly bar staff. The lovely couple who run your grocery shop can’t beat the competition and before you know it it’s turned into a mini-supermarket staffed by people with a collective IQ of 34. And after several years of using a pretty trouble-free, reliable operating system on your computer you find that Windows XP is no longer available and you have to get Vista instead.

After five years of good use my laptop finally went up to cyber heaven and I had to get a new one. I don’t like being forced to get things quickly but I managed to find a Dell in the local computer store and so was quite excited about trying it out. The computer itself lived up to Dell’s reputation – sleek, with a well-designed keyboard and excellent picture and sound. The problem was that it came with Windows Vista.

To start with Vista seemed OK. I was rather pleased that its being in Czech (I bought it in Prague) presented no problems – my Czech is now very good but I have trouble enough understanding some computer terminology in English! And it’s so pretty with its transparent window frames and 3-D effects. Surely all the adverse publicity I’d been hearing about Vista was just from those people who resent Bill Gates’s success and like to bash Microsoft at every turn?

I soon realised that the change from XP to Vista was the equivalent of swapping a Mercedes for a Lada. How would you feel if, eagerly anticipating a date with the gorgeous hunk/beautiful nymphette of your dreams, you got landed instead with…well, me? Vista is a comedown in so many ways that these analogies are not (too) exaggerated.

The first intimation I had that Vista might be a problem was when I started to install my staple programs. Every time I tried to install something the screen went dim, and I couldn’t proceed until I’d given permission (sometimes twice). Now, I’d bought the display computer and wondered if perhaps the shop guys had put some sort of a block on the system, but soon found out that this is one of Vista’s new features. It’s called User Account Control (UAC) and the idea is that it will stop the user deleting all the system files, downloading all the spyware they can find, or whatever. In theory it’s not a bad idea but in practice it’s like one of Labour’s policies – well-meaning but completely daft. After twenty or so of these prompts I was clicking “Proceed” without paying any attention. Vista might have been warning me that by installing such-and-such a program I would start World War III, but I wouldn’t have noticed. Eventually I found a way to disable UAC (it’s in Control Panel under User Accounts). Needless to say, Vista doesn't like this and constantly nags you to turn it back on.

Then I needed to find a file. I’d installed a screensaver but needed to modify it. This might not seem like the most important thing to address when setting up a computer, but I’d created a screensaver of pictures of the gorgeous model Vera Jordanova (she was in the otherwise horrible film Hostel 2) and was keen to get her going. So to speak. Well, I knew what the file was called but doing a search, Vista told me it didn’t exist. It was around then that I discovered one of Vista’s worst features, the indexed search.

Indexed search works a bit like this. A mate of yours makes a list of everything in one room of your house. A while later, you consult that list to find your car keys – which you won’t of course find if (a) they weren’t there when your mate made his list or (b) you have removed them from that room. Vista works on the same principle, basically – as time goes on, it makes a list of files. By default, that’s in folders like Documents and Contacts – it doesn’t do the system files unless you change a setting. Now, when do you normally do a search? Is it more likely to be to find the document “Letter to Solicitor” or to find the file qlt5djbm.dll that you need to locate to solve a system problem? I’d say that “Letter to Solicitor” may, just may be in a folder called Letters that you created, whereas the other file could be just about anywhere. So really to get the search working properly you need to index all files, which takes ages, uses a lot of space, and (I am told) slows the system down. There is an option to turn indexing off and this helps, if you can stand the constant nagging to turn it back on again. In XP you just typed the name of the file and you found it in a matter of minutes at most.

What’s more, Service Pack 1 removes the Search option from the Start Menu. You can get it back, if you’re confident with registry editing and are willing to sacrifice one of the other Start Menu options.

Ah, you say, but it’s only a minor annoyance. And so it is. As is losing the Network Connections icon in Control Panel (another registry tweak gets this back). Or no longer being able to associate particular icons with certain file types. You need to get a third-party program called FileTypesMan to do this. Having to wait for updates to install at shutdown and startup is a minor annoyance too, unlike XP which did most of the updating while the computer was still running and you were working.

It’s also a minor annoyance that Windows Mail, which replaces Outlook Express, only recognises US English in its spell check. Outlook Express used your default Word dictionary while Windows Mail has four built-in languages. In fairness, there are some improvements here – the spell check will suggest corrections for words which have been run together (e.g. Vistasucks) and Windows Mail is quite good at detecting unwanted mail. But I get rather tired of having to add to the custom dictionary every time I am told that “-ise” should be “-ize” or that words like “colour” shouldn’t have a “u” in them. I’m not sniffy about US spellings and accept they are a valid alternative, but we never had the problem before so why should we have it now?

If you set the Power Options to "do not require a password" when waking the computer from standby, Windows Vista resets this to "require a password" at random intervals, even if you don't have one (you have to click on your user icon in the latter case). This may not be a major problem but why can't Vista do what you tell it? I may have sorted this one, having wasted yet more time fiddling about, but I don't trust Vista enough to be certain.

You may decide to set a temporary password on your computer if taking it on your travels or you are going to be away for a while. When you get back you remove the password and hey presto! All your Windows Mail login credentials disappear and you have to type them all in again. So despite security overkill with User Account Control, Vista compromises security as people may not bother setting a password if they have to enter all their email usernames and passwords every time.

The Disc Defragmenter in Vista is a joke. In XP you got an initial analysis, a progress report which showed the available disc space, which files were being moved and the time left. With Vista you get the ever-so-helpful comment "This may take from a few minutes to a few hours" (you can bet on "a few hours") and the only sign of progress is the stupid rotating blue circle that appears when Vista is working. True, you can schedule the defragmenter to run at a specified time, though even here we get complications. The default time is 1.00 am, a time you're unlikely to be working. Fair enough, but at 1.00 am your computer may well be on standby, and if so the program doesn't run, unless you are savvy enough to hunt around in the Task Scheduler and tick the option to wake the computer to perform this task. Most people won't realise this and take Vista's assertion that defragmentation was last performed  at 1.00 am on such-and-such a date at face value, even if the computer was in standby mode.

Even some of the features that have been retained from XP have bugs in them. In XP you could change the sound scheme so that you could replace the beeps and jingles that herald errors or queries with your own sounds. All you had to do was download or create a sound file and there are plenty of free ones available, ranging from the flatulent through mooing cows to sloppy kisses. Then, after a few quick adjustments in Control Panel, you could set these sounds as default. If you grew tired of them you could reinstate the original sounds or choose new ones. If you found it annoying to get beeped or dinged at whenever Windows queried something, you could choose to have no sound at all. In Vista you can do the same thing, and the process is identical. Except for one thing: if you change the sound scheme, you will find that Vista will then make all sorts of unwanted sounds. Every time you click on an item in a list in certain programs you'll get a Windows beep (or whatever sound you've replaced it with) even if you then set the beep sound to "no sound". After much Googling I found a cure (it involves yet another registry change) thanks to some kind soul on the Internet. Sound scheme changes worked perfectly with XP, so why not with Vista? Ironically, the only reason I discovered this fault was that I'd become so fed up with error after error that I had changed the error message warning tone to a female voice saying "Sorry, I've ****ed up again!"

There are compatibility problems with some of the hardware and software you have spent the last seven years collecting. My excellent Laplink cable for transferring files doesn’t work with Vista. I spent several hours trying to get the BT Broadband software to install the modem needed to access this service. I was successful in the end thanks to an internet forum but it was very frustrating. My HTML editor that I use to create these pages didn’t install properly and as a result of this added reams of gibberish to the HTML code of any page I edited. I sorted that too – but the aforementioned three problems cost me a minimum of 20 hours – time I could have spent doing something more pleasant than getting a headache courtesy of Vista. I accept that older programs can’t always be expected to work with a brand new operating system but surely Microsoft could have made some effort to ensure that compatibility with newer programs wasn’t too much of a problem?

I even had compatibility problems getting the screensaver to work – perhaps one of Vista’s worst sins since I’d rather feast my eyes on the lovely Vera than a string of error messages!