I bought a copy of Dawn of War II today. I decided to throw it on my computer and check it out briefly since I wasn't going to have time to play it this weekend.

Sounds simple, right?

When I shut down Vista this morning so I could take my laptop with me when I left the house, it did its normal trick of installing updates without asking me if I wanted it to. This forced me to leave the computer running for another twenty minutes before I could leave. This pisses me off every time it happens, but I've gotten used to it by now.

When I started Vista up this evening to install DOW II, it accused me of software piracy and forced me to dial a number and spend ten minutes on the phone to reactivate a piece of software that I legitimately own. Thanks, now I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy about you guys. Not to mention, how useless is your reactivation process? I didn't even have to speak to a person, the entire thing was entirely automated, and if I had been a pirate it would have been just as easy to enter the reactivation code. Idiots.

Then, I restarted Vista to get rid of the message it had plastered to the bottom right of the screen telling me my copy of Windows was illegal (by the way, this message was added to my desktop immediately after I successfully reactivated my license). As it was restarting, Vista failed to boot due to "software that was recently installed" - Microsoft's own software, I might add. I spent twenty minutes running a repair tool from the Vista installation disc to get back in to my computer again.

After Vista finally booted up again, I dropped in the DOW II disk. It recommended I update Vista to SP 1, so I spent half an hour downloading it. After about 20 minutes of running, the installation failed.

I spent almost two hours updating my entire system with all the outstanding patches. After this, the SP 1 installation still failed.

The failure linked to a knowledge base article recommending I download a tool to prepare my system for SP 1 installation. I spent 45 minutes downloading and running the tool. I installed SP 1 again. The same error message popped up. FAILED AGAIN.

Four hours later, I'm installing DOW II without Vista SP 1. And frankly, I'm left asking myself how a company with $50 billion in cash is capable of producing software of such abysmal quality. I'm embarrassed on their behalf.

Here's how software installations are done, Microsoft.

1) Check/resolve dependencies
2) Download software
3) Install software
4) Reboot if necessary

Apple's been getting this right for seven years in OS X. Linux has had apt-get even longer. Most of the stuff in UNIX can be downloaded and installed with make with relative ease.

Microsoft, I'm happy to inform you that Vista is a fucking atrocity. I know your next attempt will only be your seventh major operating system release, but maybe you can try to get it right this time.