Nearly back up..

New laptop arrived today, running Vista out of the box. Oh my god, what a total disaster Vista is!

The first thing I tried to do - and that it asked me to do - was to register the machine. OK, I thought, I want my warranty nicely set in stone, so I fire up the registration... which takes me to CLUB SONY! in Internet Exploder 7, which tells me that Club Sony's certificate is invalid, which crashes IE.

You laugh, right, because otherwise the tears would short circuit the keyboard?

So I'm downgrading (most would say upgrading) instantly to XP, but if, like me, you're getting a new Vaio, don't let Sony tell you that "it's just a matter of getting online to our website" in order to downgrade. Sony no longer ship actual OS installation disks it seems, so you have to create your own recovery disks... which requires two DVD-Rs. I dunno about you, but I backup to either solid state or externals, not DVDs, so I had to schlep myself and the kid down to the stationers pronto to buy these curious things for an extra twenty quid.

So here I am on the EEE, watching the progress bar of Vista creep along as it writes the backup disks. Look at all those drop shadows, and glowy bits, and swooshes. Gosh it is just gross. Be off my machine, crufty crap! Away wi' ye!

Comments

[neil h]

Why don't you put Ubuntu on it, or at least a dual boot system? Download the live cd and give it a whirl to make sure your hardware works with it first. You honestly will not regret it.

[Mr Tom]

My lovely wife-to-be got a laptop with Vista in it. No hassles for her at all. In fact she loves it.

[Alice]

I've been eyeing up Ubuntu, but I'm wondering how many games would fare under a linux install. There's Linux WoW, fer sure, but Portal, etc?

[Ron]

I dual boot just for the purpose of playing windows games... windows does nothing else for me and has been relegated to the rank of "console".

There's always transgaming's cedega - but it's still a pain to deal with...

As for your DVD-R's - rip 'em to ISOs when it's done and store them how you like.

[pol Llovet]

oh, just drink the kool-aid already and get a macbook. they really are as good as all that. The ability to run windows natively (if i want to) is a delicious frosting. like many of the dorks i know, i now fully embrace my google-mac internet lifestyle.

It's stories like this that make the macbook the best windows notebook out there.

[april]

ITA with the above poster. I have a desktop with Vista that is driving me insane. When my laptop finally died I RAN, not walked, to buy a MacBook Pro. Best decision I ever made in my life. I bootcamped XP onto the MBP and now it feeds my WoW addiction and can play anything else I want it to.

Seriously, Mac is the way to go!

[Alice]

Heh. Sweet, apple fans ;)

I had a mac. It died. Also, trusted computing, yuk. Naw, I like PCs, there's such a ton of good hacks and mods and apps and games and the like, it's worth putting up with Windoze.

Just about.

[Rob]

I just bought a new HP tower with Vista Home Premium x64. One of the first things I did was disable User Account Control.

As of right now, the only thing I can't stand about Vista is the audio mixer. The one in XP was almost perfect but the one in Vista is useless. Why did Microsoft mess with it?

[JET]

I quite like Vista. It has most of the same problems any Windows OS has, but has solved som of the more stupid file handling behavior. It's actually the most Mac-like OS MS have ever made, which is why it's a tad better than XP, of course. I'd use a MAc, but I need 100% genuine Windows for work purposes, sadly.

Still, I have yet to see any Vista complainers tell me what - specifically - is so much better about XP.

[Russ]

I love it when you computer sorts get together...I have no idea what 98 per cent of the comments on this page mean...

[kinkyPanda]

I like vista and i'm agree whit you, Russ:)

[Russ]

Hehe...ever bootcamped XP to your MBP...not me, sister...!