A fellow Kiwanian and his wife came to me for advise when buying a new laptop last week. I advised them insisting it come with XP. They didn’t take my advice and bought one with Vista because Best Buy told them that’s all they sell and the system could not be converted to XP (Does anyone know if this is a fact?).
I spent 4 hours yesterday working with a system I’m unfamiliar with (Vista), trying to get the laptop and their old desktop (XP) linked through a wireless router, and a new printer installed. I have to go back Monday and finish up. While not all of the problems I encountered stem from Vista, I don’t find it as intuitive as XP.
Note: The install pamphlet for the router came with instructions that related to XP installation sequences (I’ve installed one under XP). The way the software ran in Vista, it looked and performed completely different than it showed in the pamphlet (or what I’d experienced before). Boy, was that confusing. Also, the printer (an HP All-In-One) was not installing. It was in the ink cartridge alignment stage and wouldn’t progress after that. Sheesh!
I’m NOT an IT tech. Nor am I a geek who can whiz through software and hardware issues. But I am more experienced than the average customer, and these folks and I agreed that they’d have been completely clueless if on their own. The IT world lives in a bubble, and has no idea what kind of a monster they’ve created for their non-corporate customers. And Microsoft is the pinnacle of this disassociation.
I found a great deal Black Friday for a Dell 531. It was designed for Vista and only came in the vista flavors (home, pro, whatever). I took the standard home vista. It sucked.
So, I went thru the process of putting on XP on it anyway, and now have an Excellent machine. Here are the caveats:
Installing XP itself went generally okay, but left me without most drivers, like USB, network, sound card, video, etc, etc. The system still worked, albeit with no network, low screen res, USB 1.1, etc.
Forgeddabout gathering the drivers from DELL; they must have aggreements w/ MS that the machine is vista-only.
Browsing (and participating too) various user forums, found fantastic driver sources... so loaded drivers from the various manufacturers: motherboard chip set, video card, etc.
Other users have now gathered all the required drivers and put them in single packages for download. The bottom line: Everything works now with no "yellow-flag" hardware.
That is how it has always been with their products, especially new ones, with lots of other companys products inbedded in the OS. Had a computer business since 1983, and we finally wrote a software program called, Bill Bill. It logged how many hours we spent on each of his products with our customers and the frustration level. Then it emailed the invoice to the proper department!!!
All the hours we spent supporting MS products after selling the hardware Nothing wrong with the hardware everything wrong with the software.
“The IT world lives in a bubble.”
VT, SWTAATATPKWTM. (Very true, starting with the acronyms and the assumption that people know what they mean.)