[geeks] The Dog's Breakfast: Microsoft Windows Vista

[Mike Murphy]

On 5/3/07, Dan Duncan <danduncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>I just bought a new laptop (my first new laptop ever) and booted into Vista
>long enough to make sure all the hardware was present and working (and
>what it was) before I wiped it off the drive.

A friend acquired a shiny, new HP laptop with Vista Home Premium. He tried it
for a day or two, didn't like it, and wanted XP. I helped him blow away Vista
and load XP. That's when I went to HP's site to get the drivers for XP. Oops.
No drivers for XP, thanks very much. Fortunately, before blowing away the
rather bloated Vista, I had gone through the hour or two procedure to make the
restore DVD's. Note the plural. Then I went through the hour or two procedure
to reload and reconfigure Vista as though from scratch. I was just thrilled
with the whole procedure. It all worked, including the install of XP which
left the laptop minus audio, nice video, and networking.

I received a bulk eMail from a MS VP of something important about how
important it was for me that MS is putting in place anti-piracy in Vista.
Newspeak. The anti-piracy stuff is bloated, the security stuff is bloated, the
GUI is bloated, and if I hadn't conned my friend into getting the 2GB rather
than 1GB system, he would only have 200MB free after the tiny system
requirements were met. It was nice of HP to have drivers for Vista only; I'm
sure that pleased MS.

Do folks remember how quickly the UUCP network disappeard in favor of Internet
connectivity? It seems that massive system change snaps from one state to
another rather than blending. I wonder if Vista may be the force that snaps
usage to Linux. It wouldn't make me sad at all.