The biggest mistake ever

You don’t get to middle adulthood without making a few mistakes. I have made my share. I’ll always regret the incident with the chocolate milk, the banana and donkey and I still blush when I think of the time I took the Olsen twins to McDonalds

Those were serious mistakes but way and above those outbreaks of stupidity is my decision to buy a PC with Vista on it.
It’s not that Vista is a terrible operating system it’s just underwhelming and irrelevant. Below I have listed the pros and cons that I have personally found since August (compared to Windows 2000 or XP SP2).

Pros.
· Spider Solitaire is much nicer.
· The Volume control mixer has a level for each application not just file type.
· Some of the icons are nicer and browsing folders seems easier
· Er that’s it

Cons
· There was no driver for my printer.
· It’s slow – for the PC it’s on, it’s very slow.
· That Aero interface is pointless.
· The gadgets are inferior to the gadgets available with Google Desktop.
· I still have not been able to use the wireless NIC that came preinstalled (driver issue).
· The security stuff is intrusive.

When I was making the buying decision I was thinking Mac with OS X or PC with Vista and I chose PC because of the software we already owned and I figured being a Microsoft product Vista would become ubiquitous and getting a little early knowledge would help me. The Mac for its part was just plain too expensive. However, upon reflection the cost of the time spent on the wireless card and buying a new printer the Mac would have not been so expensive. I also find it interesting that the take up of Vista does not seem to have been anything like as rapid as I expected. I have yet to come across a business that has moved wholesale to Vista.


On the subject of Macs – I love them! Unfortunately, they have always been just a little more money than I could afford. And if you are following the amusing Mac/PC adverts don’t be fooled. I was a Mac user during the introduction or OS 7 and OS 8 and OS X.0. None of them were as smooth as Apple would have you believe and we still see some incompatibilities between OS X.4 and OS X.5 (leopard). Lastly, also realise that the Mac is just a nice (very very nice) GUI running on a cut down Unix system.

If I had to decide again, knowing what I know now, what would I do? For ease of transition and lack of learning curve - given our budget - we should have gone for XP on the same PC platform. The network cards and printers would all have worked and it would have been faster than that donkey when he saw the banana.

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Bazza