Vista

Vista box

I should be working on my case comment, I know. But somehow, Cuerrier just can’t get me as worked up as Vista does.

I run Ubuntu and it’s great. Sure, there’s a little bit of hacking to be done to get wireless working, and hibernate and suspend are unreliable but it just runs so smoothly. Once you get Linux up and running, it just keeps going forever.

I have briefly used Vista. It came pre-installed on my laptop, so I have booted into it a few times in the past year. But I am now forced to enter the Vista world by the Faculty of Law. They will allow us to type our exams, but only with nanny software installed. The nanny software only runs in Windows. And so here I am.

My brief encounters with Vista led me to form a generally positive opinion. It looks fairly nice and, from what I hear, the security is much-improved. Sure, there were some shaky months at the beginning but I’m sure we all remember Windows Millennium, the switch from Windows 98 to XP (since we all skipped Millennium), the switch from OS9 to OSX, or the switch to Leopard (or whatever jungle cat the latest OSX is named after). Switching is hard work. Drivers break, software doesn’t work, hardware is no longer supported. And you were just getting used to the last version.

So I dismissed the complaints. “People will settle in,” I told myself. And then I used Vista.

At points last night, I was nearly in tears. Things weren’t where I left them in XP. TrueCrypt caused Explorer to hang and I couldn’t figure out how to open the task manager—I finally did figure it out and the computer just died when I opened it. And now, I have spent hours installing updates after finally convincing Windows that updates did exist. It does this thing just before it’s about to confirm that I really want to do something where the screen goes black for a second. It is scary. I’m pretty sure I screamed—maybe not quite screamed, but emitted a sound of some sort—once or twice when this happened.

I don’t know what happened. The last time I used Windows it was XP. Ugly, clunky, but familiar. Now it reminds me of MacOS. Why? MacOS scares me. I want my computers to act like computers. I’ll be glad when this is over.

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