I’m serious … not one red cent and if you have already spent your hard earned money on any of the versions I’d be demanding your money back. This may not apply to stand alone computers but if you have a home network or even worse a small business network that has Vista machines connected to it you are in for a world of aggravation and hair pulling if you ever want to copy or move large files around the network – that is if you can even get it to do it in the first place.

I have spent the whole day trying every trick that I can think of to simply move large files from my Vista machine to the XP machine in the other room. It would have been quicker and less painful to burn the damn files to cd and sneaker net them to the other room; but here’s an example of one of my efforts.

At 10:21PM I began the copy of a 20.7MB file from my Vista machine over the network to the XP machine. Not an overly big file file and when I tried the same file but copying to the XP machine from the XP machine everything went just as it should.

But Vista it seems has a mind all of its own when it comes to what is being called a bug by Microsoft. So I sat there and watched as nothing happened .. no file being copied .. just that green little bar going back and forth. Then low and behold at 10:24PM up pops an error message that there was a problem accessing the file and that maybe I should check my network settings just incase they weren’t working right and then click on the Try Again button.

Well considering that at this point in time I had a download progressing quite nicely I safely assumed that my network connection was just hunky dory so I clicked on the good ol’ Try Again.

Well after 2 minutes of nothing happening I figured their version of Try Again meant something other than what I did so I hit the cancel button which meant waiting another 2 minutes while it decided to actually cancel out.

The short end of this is that this problem has been documented, ranted and otherwise been brought to Microsoft’s attention and the best they can do is say there is a hotfix available but you have to contact them and hopefully not charged for the support call.

Well I’m sorry but this is just plain unacceptable and not something that people who have forked out large sums of money should expect from the WOW operating system. This is something that should be dealt with immediately and with a great big frikken apology from Baldy Ballmer for letting an OS with such a basic feature as copy and move across networks being f’sked up even going out the door.

So my advice – until MS either patches this problem immediately or get’s their thumb out of their ass and get SP1 ready to ship leave Vista on the shelf where it belongs.