| I had a wonderful Sony Vaio
running XP for several years. Trouble began to develop with the
video display that seemed to be unfixable. "Replace the
motherboard" was the cry from several Sony techs that took a
look. I had the computer now for 3 years and had been lugging it
all over the World. It didn't seem so bad that I might need to
purchase a new one for this new job I had started. HP has this terrific series of notebooks called Pavilion dv2000, dv3000 and dv9000. I purchased a dv2000 which is a 14.5" 6:9 screen with a Turion processor. I have always disliked Microsoft's interest in making Windows look pretty. It clutters the screen and uses too many colors that are two close together. I have all my XP machines using classic windows desktop style and hoped to be able to do this here. Sure enough, my new VISTA HOME PREMIUM (what are all these versions for) and it is clean and running well. HOWEVER, it takes a while to find all the bugs: 1. ACTIVE SYNC DOES NOT WORK IN VISTA --The most incredible thing is that a brand new, out of the box Vista computer will not Active Sync with my Windows PDA. Microsoft discontinued Active Sync and now has some other crappy way of syncing to a device that is running THEIR OWN SOFTWARE! Not only does it not work, it does not come in Vista. You have to download more software and patches. Now, wouldn't you think that Vista should be compatible with Windows Mobile? So now I own a Blackberry instead, which works fine. 2. TRY TO FIND NETWORK ADAPTER PROPERTIES -- Its there somewhere, but will take you 20 minutes to find it. 3. USB DRIVE TRANSFERS ARE SLOW -- Why is it that Microsoft can never figure out how to anticipate how long a file transfer is going to take. They should just give up on this one. The new window "calculating time remaining" stinks and takes forever. Maybe it would go faster if they just did the transfer instead of trying to tell us about it. 4. CAN'T OPEN PICTURES FROM DESKTOP -- No, its not your application, its VISTA again. I don't think it did this all the time, but I cannot open a picture with any application if it is on the desktop. You have to put it in a folder first, then you can open it. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? 5. QUICKTIME WILL NOT RUN IN VISTA -- Now, maybe this is an Apple thing. Vista has been around for developers for quite a while. But -- what the heck did Microsoft do to Windows so that it will not run Quicktime. On my computer several things happen. Either the file will not play smoothly, or it will kill the entire computer. Actually, I think Quicktime will eventually kill your Vista OS system no matter what you do or no matter the size of the file. Just open it and wait a while. BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. 6. I have been to no less than 2 Hotels in my travels that cannot hijack the Vista Browser so you can log into the hotel Internet system. For those of you that travel, you know what I am talking about. So I spent a week in Adelaide, Australia having to run down to the Cafe to check my email before attending the days meetings. I was staying in one of the nicest places in town that had Internet in every room, it just wouldn't work on my VISTA computer. Man, the MAC guys are laughing at me now. That's all for now - Isn't that enough? I'm sure there are many more things. |