Admittedly, I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan in the world, but recently my views have been moderating. This very moment I'm using Windows Live Writer to compose this post, which is a brilliant piece of software. I've written about how much I love Photosynth. This was all before Vista, though. Vista has raised my ire towards Microsoft in a way it has not been raised in a long time.
A couple weekends ago Jen bought a new laptop. It's an HP Pavilion db6500z, which admittedly isn't the best laptop in the world but at the same time is nothing to sneeze at. Jen's purposes were primarily writing papers for school and surfing the internet. The HP has an AMD Turion 64 x2 dual core and a gig of RAM. Although I would have preferred to just stick with XP right off the bat, I wasn't given that option because all of the laptops at Fry's were loaded with Vista. Resigned to Vista, we made our purchase and Jen happily brought her new tool/toy home.
As soon as I began setting the laptop up, though, we were witness first-hand to how big a piece of crap Vista is. This laptop is extremely slow - it runs like Jen's version of ME used to. And as anyone who has used ME knows, that's saying a lot. I first attributed the slowness to all of the crapware HP loads on its machines, but after diligently removing any software that did not have an obvious purpose the performance of the machine has only marginally improved. I've watched the hardware monitors as the laptop lags and the memory and chip are doing fine, it's just the operating system itself that is painful.
Resigned to the fact that a downgrade makes the most sense I did some research and it turns out that you can only get a downgrade from Microsoft if you have Vista Business or Ultimate. Of course - the laptop came with Vista Home Premium. What this all means is that in order to get the laptop downgraded we're going to have to buy an OEM copy of XP to install. The OEM software doesn't really cost that much (<$100) but the principle of the thing is such that every time I think about it the veins in my forehead begin to pulse.
So frustrating. I wish Jen were open to learning linux.
