I've been using Vista since two weeks before the official release. I'm relatively satisfied, but one thing still bugs me:

Vista doesn't do File Tagging, Rating or Commenting. Seriously. They SAY it does, but it does not. What it does do, is edit metadata in a very few file types that have internal metadata which Vista understands.

Therefore, you can tag and rate music, video, MS Word files, and pictures. That's IT.

NEWS FLASH: There are other types of files! I have 5 hard drives and managing it all is getting a bit old. I have tens of thousands of TEXT files for instance. None of them are in Word format - and I don't want them in Word format - they are portable as is. I also have zip and rar files for various things such as game addons and mods, etc.

All are scattered in bajillions of folders across all 5 drives. Some are difficult to categorize. Tags help with this as hierarchical folder organization only allows for one category per file.

But Vista doesn't support this because Microsoft was too bothered with trying to lock out hackers to actually complete some basic file system extensions that would allow these things.

How easy would it be? Pretty fooking easy. Currently I'm using xPlorer2 because it supports Comments on any file type. It does so by using descript.ion - which was a hidden file invented BACK UNDER DOS by 3rd party providers to solve this problem. descript.ion is a simple text file that lists extended descriptions for files in the current folder. Damn MS, I'd be happy even with something that simple, if it could be integrated with the OS and searched on. But no - you couldn't be bothered to provide such basic functionality.

Currently, I'm not considering converting to OSX or Linux. Linux has repeatedly bent me over and fooked me. Most recently by erasing the partition map on a drive when I told it to put the bootloader on that drive, but the linux partition on another. I ended up with an unbootable Linux on the intended drive and a RAW drive on the one I wanted the boot loader on - losing every single partition on the drive in one fell swoop. 200GB of data gone, thankfully none of it personal data which is of course backed up elsewhere. OSX is just too damned expensive. I've done the whole Hackintosh bit, and had it running, but then the final problem comes into play. So long as MS is the "Market Leader", there will be things I want to do that just aren't available on any other platform. Currently the ONLY thing I want to do not available on Vista is proper file tagging/commenting. I'm hoping it becomes available in Windows 7, but I'm not holding out any hopes.

MS needs to quit bloating the OS and start providing improved BASIC FUNCTIONALITY. DWM really does nothing for me, for example. I have a high-end system, but I already had everything I wanted in terms of eye-candy from Stardock's Object Desktop Suite. Sure DWM makes it work better supposedly, but as an end user I really don't care about that, as it worked well under XP. The search is MUCH better in Vista, true. But it could have been even better had FILE TAGGING, RATING and COMMENTS been integrated properly into the filesystem so you could work with all file types, not just a select few of them.

If anybody knows of a 3rd-party file management solution for Windows that fully integrates such a system, let me know. I've tried Directory Opus, and have settled on xPlorer2, but neither really gets past the limitations in the file system.