VISTA Sorrows

Spent the afternoon visiting my family for a birthday party.

AHHHHHH!!!!!

Sometimes being a computer 'nerd' sucks. If you are one, you can relate. Everyone jumps you for help. "I installed something and my laptop does not work." "I visited a website and now I have pop-ups every time I get on the internet." etc etc etc.

Well being a computer "nerd" and visiting relatives can be an invitation for freelance work. Talk about being attacked. As soon as I walked in, I was told there was 2 laptops waiting for me and an xbox that wasn't working right. OH MY!

Well not only did I get a billion questions while fixing the laptops, I had to listen to every family member complain about VISTA. Yep. Several of them have upgraded or purchased new laptops and unlike their exciting transition from Windows 98 to Windows XP, they found their Vista upgrade very disappointing and painful.

One of my family members actually purchased a new laptop with extra memory etc and it runs worse than his 5 yr old xp laptop. the proof is in the pudding. I can see if only a handful of Vista upgraders have had bad feeling towards vista but the sheer number of complaints have really begun to annoy me. It seems like everyone I know who has vista, hates it. Except one or two media whores I know who think the shadows and translucently are the coolest thing since tv. Its these same people who need the latest Adobe products and/or Microsoft products. Like Office 2003 is ancient now and "How can you use Adobe Dreamweaver MX when CS3 is out?"

Well after hearing all the issues people have with Vista today, I left the party brain dead. I showed them Ubuntu, my LAVA Linux, I even said "Well go back to XP" But in the end it does not matter, Microsoft wins anyways because no matter if VISTA is a total flop, it is sold on every pc at the store. Literally my family, could not go back and ask for Windows XP to be installed on their laptops instead of VISTA. They are out of luck and I think this is the saddest part. Microsoft's days of innovation are over. It really is about exploitation now. How to best use it's strong arm. How to leverage it's monopoly. And even though I do not use Windows on my personal pcs. I inevitably have to deal with it on everyone else's. And they will be the first ones to say - It just sucks.

I think about it as I am typing this blog and using my ubuntu and I smile - at least I am free.