Argh!
So a couple things have happened over the past few weeks that resulted in me buying a new laptop today before work.
Thing the first: I got a lovely little surprise at the beginning of the month; I was picked for the employee of the month. That comes with a monetary bonus. So that on top of the OT we've all been getting lately means that I have a bit of extra cash.
Thing the second: Mass is doing their tax-free weekend thing this weekend.
So I ended up at Best Buy today. I went in knowing exactly what I wanted since I knew it would be a madhouse and there'd be no way to actually look at things or try them out. I did that last weekend. Having heard all kinds of horror stories about Vista I was more than a bit apprehensive about that. But I figured I'd buy the thing, see how it works, and then decide if I want to deal with it or if I want to do a little reformatting myself.
After messing around with the thing at work this afternoon for about two hours... I'm gonna be reformatting when I get home tonight. Vista is driving me absolutely nuts. I brought a couple programs with me so I could see how it works as far as installing things goes and it just refuses to cooperate. I keep changing settings, using different accounts... had to go into the command prompt to find the administrator account! I keep getting "access denied" messages no matter what administrative powers I give myself.
It is just not intuitive at all. Settings aren't where I expect them to be, or they're hidden three menus down, and that's assuming the menu bar even shows up!
It's pretty, but that's about it. And even the pretty is rather annoying (at least to me, I'm sure that's not true for everyone). The menu boxes have to do a little animation every time they pop up. It wastes time and it's distracting. I don't care if it's pretty! I just want it to work!
I've already gone looking and all the drivers I'll need to make sure the hardware keeps working with XP exist. And I have an old copy of XP at home, so tonight I'll be joining the ranks of the "downgraders."