My main machine developed a problem in the onboard video over the weekend, and is now effectively useless. It was a 2.5 yr-old HP laptop with an Athlon 64 and nVidia graphics running XP. Everything else seems to be working normally, but the video signal is trashed. Well, you can't replace the video system in a notebook without replacing the motherboard and that would be an expensive proposition, so I understand. Long story short, I sprung for a new Windows box with a dual-core Pentium running Vista since I couldn't find a new machine anywhere with XP.

Now I have to crawl through broken glass trying to get my many applications re-installed, re-auhorized, reconfigured and functioning again. I'm not in a very good frame of mind over all this, and in such a need to vent that I came here to share my agony and frustration.

First, the good news: My new laptop (a Gateway) was less than half the price I paid for the HP/XP box in late '04 and it has 4x the system memory, 4x the available video memory, plus the dual-core Pentium CPU rather than the Athlon 3400. Additionally, I retrieved the hard drive from the old laptop, inserted same into a $29 USB enclosure, and amazingly, Vista let me have access to most of my data. I say most because I've encountered a few situations where simple operations were prohibited for reasons I don't understand.

Now the bad news. In the first place, I can't understand why things were moved around in Vista for no good reason I can discern.

For example, to save a web page in Vista, you no longer use the familiar file, save as...routine. No. Microsoft, for reasons known only to itself, decided that this simple operation needed fixing, so they moved the process to a choice called "page" over on the opposite side of what passes for the menu bar. So today, instead of clicking on the familiar 'File' menu choice, I have to remember to click on "Page", as I struggle to regain services and save a bunch of relevant web pages for offline referral at my leisure. I'm wasting all kinds of motion and effort just to accomplish simple tasks, and saving web pages is just the beginning of it.

It's a bit like being a pitcher who's told he now has to deliver his pitches to the batter standing at first base. The idea, of course, is that habitiual physical motions are difficult to change, and should be changed only if there is some worthwhile benefit. Apparently, anyone at MS who had this point of view was over-ruled by the mavens of change.

But my biggest issues with Vista are program/application problems. Almost nothing has re-installed gracefully, CorelDraw being the single exception. Corel was even smart enough to retrieve my upgrade authorization from the old hard drive - I guess that's what happened.

Magix Audio Studio 10 looked like it had installed properly, but now the Midi Studio part of it pops up an info window stating "Access is denied - Result code = 5" and shuts down.

Control panel now has a Problem/Solution section to get fixes from the mfgs, but none of the several problems I had listed evoked any response from MS. Another audio ap, Cakewalk MC3 reinstalled without critical functionality available, and would not accept my authorization code either. Feature that: a $50 ap requires an authorization code that now is preventing me from running an ap that I paid for, and causing a lot of frustration.

I can only guess what's going to happen when I get around to trying to reinstall 3D Studio Max. I had to enter exceptions and whatnot for XP (spash screen prevented the ap from loading) so I can see that it's going to be an adventure. In addition, the ap requires a hardware dongle hanging off the parallel port, but as some of you may know, parallel ports are not found on new consumer machines, so I'm facing shelling out some dough to get a usb parallel adapter, and then the adventure of getting it all to work.

I can see now that all the reinstallation, debugging is going to take several days, perhaps many, with no guarantee that I'll get everything back.

It's painful enough when a beloved machine dies - and that was one hot, potent box - but as if to add insult to injury, Vista is now going to fight me tooth and nail as I try to reinstall my legacy aps. Sure, my copy of Max is almost 10 yrs old, but that wasn't any $50 ap, folks - far from it.

And so, I'm here today to flame HP, Intel and nVdia for the death of a perfectly functioning, highly capable, dearly beloved laptop that I handled with kid gloves and TLC, and which was an outstanding performer for 30 months. Outstanding. My old clunker ME laptop, by contrast, has been dropped twice, has duct tape over ugly cracks in the back of the sceen/lid from flexing, and is a total dog. BUT; the fool thing just keeps on running 6 years later.

And also a huge flame for Microsoft for all these headaches. Vista is good in some ways, terrible in others, as you've probably read elsewhere.

Bottom line - don't do it.

If I survive this, I'll be back with an update.

&%#@*$ POS!
S