I keep hearing horror stories about Vista but haven’t actually seen it in action yet until today.  One of my co-workers has just gotten a new machine with it pre-installed.  About thirty minutes after using this brand new machine it began blinking at her.  Yes, blinking.  A video driver went missing in the system and notified her as an OS should do.  The difference in this notification is that the screen was on for two seconds then off for two seconds then on for two seconds then off for two seconds.

Of course a new release is going to have issues, but what kind of user experience is this?  She began panicking like she had done something wrong as we all grouped around the machine laughing at the stupidity of the feature.  After watching the screen for a while it actually made me feel nervous and jittery.  I had to look away because it made me feel so uncomfortable.  We all use visual cues in the web industry to clue the user that something has happened, it is a convenient feature for user and creator.  But whoever decided it was a good idea to notify the user by giving them a seizure needs to be drug out into the street and shot.