Speaking of Complaining About Vista...

Windows Vista: Arrgh!

Coming into this new job, I bought a new laptop - an HP Pavilian dv6000 that I like quite a lot.

But it came with Vista. Which has made me very unhappy.

Now, I'm not against change, and I'm not a knee-jerk Microsoft basher. I just like stuff to work. Vista itself works fine. But not much else seems to work with Vista. It's like Rosanne Barr that way.

Microsoft must have kept secret every aspect of how applications operate with Vista - perhaps as part of an insane tactic to get us to try Microsoft apps. Do they think that strangling Firefox will make me love Explorer? Maybe they've been reading Greek tragedies in Redmond or something.

Anyway, yeah - Vista killed Firefox on my laptop. Actually, Firefox ran fine for a while, so Vista apparently decided to kill it once Vista thought I liked Firefox better than Explorer. The Microsoft people, concerned that I might write something unflattering, got a technician on the phone who helped fix this. How the other millions of users of Firefox will fare, I don't know.

Musicmatch, my preferred jukebox, won't run on Vista. The software for my Creative Zen Micro music player (yes, I am an iPod holdout) won't work on Vista. Oh, and Vista came with Office 2007, which doesn't work with anything except Vista. Word 07 docs don't seem to open on a Mac or XP machine. Same with Excel and PowerPoint. I took a PPT presentation on a flash drive into a talk I was about to give, and the XP machine on hand couldn't open it. Handy, huh?

A bunch of other programs I own - such as Cakewalk's Guitar Tracks Pro and the software for my Yamaha MagicStomp guitar pedal - were a challenge to install on Vista and still do not run properly. Actually, the Cakewalk software has been rendered all but useless.

Other than that, is Vista worth it? I really don't know. It has some nifty features, but they don't seem to make my working life better or easier than it was using XP. I'm sure there are improvements that are not apparent to users like me - in security, maybe, or the way files are organized under the hood. But so far, I'm not feeling the love.

Then again, maybe I need to give it time. Laptop magazine recently gave Vista a B+, saying: "We like Vista more the longer we live with its many new features and subtle tweaks." Hm. We'll see.