My Sister's Vista Laptop Nightmare

Article = none, personal experiance

My sister bought a laptop with Vista on it.
Price tag, 600$ , not including recovery disk. Did she want a recovery disk ? She passed on it. Typically they start at 400$ for the disk, though I understand the price has recently been dropping.

Running a lap top, or any computer , without a recovery cd is a bad idea. They aways crash. So the true price of her computer is 1000$, so far.

Guess what ?

Vista crashes. A lot. And it wont run her old office 2003 , it wants her to upgrade to the latest and greatest office suite. Saw a copy for sale for 500$ , but it was used, but what the hey , we'll take that as a "brand new" price just for arguments sake.

Thats 1500$ so far for the lap top.

She wasn't running Vista though , because it wouldn't run her office software. She'd fallen back to WinXP. And needed drivers for the video card to watch DVD's , and the two network cards (one ethernet , one wireless)

Using a memory stick , the new modern Sneaker Net , I downloaded files and we transfered them over. Only to discover Operating System Not Supported or No Compatible Hardware Found , depending on which drivers we tried. And we tried a bunch.

It would seem Microsoft has perfected the art of Vender Lock In , we now have a simple trivial network card that only has drivers in Vista , you load any other operating system on it , you lose that card. And the other two devices as well.

She ghosted her copy of Vista before removing it (nice try) but when she tried to put it back it didn't work out (didn't have a copy of the ghost image to try restoring it, but she complained bitterly about it so I thought I'd include that too)

I've learned a lot about all those lap tops you see advertised from my sister. I've learned that the real price is double what they're quoting , or more. I've learned you're stuck with Vista whether you like it or not. I've learned Vista is a nightmare of vender lock in and crashity crash crash crashedness.

Get a Linux machine. Run your old software under Wine. All the old stuff works fine under wine it's only the new stuff and the games that have problems. And don't even think about a "lap top gaming machine" , thats a 2000$ toy (who's price tag will read $1000, but its double just the same) that will spend more time broken than functional.

If you really want a Vista machine, get one from Dell ,or Compaq , or whoever, with the warrenty and the tech support and the three year financial plan where they fix everything at their expense and you just pay your 20$ / month. This 600$ up front for a machine that comes both brand new and pre-broken is just insane.

don't throw away your old computer. It may be the only thing that runs your old software :)