My View of Vista (or Why I May Need a Mac)

You may recall when I took Windows to task for treating me like an idiot. Welll, I just bought a new laptop that came pre-loaded with Vista and suddenly Windows XP seems like a lean. efficient OS that treats me like I’m a PhD.

I could rant about how Vista now asks you a third time before allowing you to do any task more complex than opening an application, but it’s a minor annoyance compared to some of the lovely new quirks to discovered.

I still use Microsoft Office for XP. It continues to serve me well and they haven’t added anything significant enough to justify me spending a thousand dollars on an upgrade. (One of the few things I miss about working for a big company - they paid to upgrade your software!). Part of that Office suite is Outlook 2002. I successfully installed Office on the new Vista machine and cloned my email account info, of course telling it to save my passwords. And it all worked fine until I closed Outlook. When I started it up again, it had purged my passwords and thus failed to retrieve my email until I used the account management tool to re-enter the passwords. A Google search on the problem confirmed that it was common to Outlook 2002 and that Microsoft had no intention of fixing it. “Please send us $1000 for newer versions of software you didn’t want to replace”.

But wait! It gets worse. I had no trouble detecting and logging into my home wireless network - except that it came up “Local Only”, meaning no Internet connectivity. After frustrating attempts to figure out all the new “user friendly” nomenclature for networking I gave up and decided to use good old DOS brute force. Finding out how to open a command line window was a chore and when I finally did and tried the old faithful “ipconfig /release” command, it told me that it required “elevation”. Huh? I live at sea level in a one story home. Did I need to hit the roof? My account was set as “Administrator” but apparently that wasn’t good enough.

In a classic Catch-22, I wanted to check the web for updated drivers, but that required web access that Vista wasn’t giving me. I tried plugging in a cable direct to the router and all of a sudden all the connections worked! Sweet! Or not…

I go to a client’s office where I’ve always successfully connected to their wireless network, but I get the dreaded “Local Only”. After seeking help (and I HATE to do that) from their network admins, I was ready to give up and plug into a network jack. Presto! Once I did that, wireless kicked in. See a pattern emerging?

I was on the road last weekend. Tried to connect in the airport. Yep - Local Only. When I got to my destination, I used someone else’s computer to research the issue. It’s common. I tried to follow some of the proposed solutions. But the only one that ever worked was “plug it into a router”. That’s kind of hard in an airport.

Microsoft is mum on the issue. The net community hasn’t been able to overcome it. And my smug, welf-satisfied Mac friends are all saying “I told you so…”