Well that didn't take long at all...
When I got the machine talked about here (a $1,200 HP desktop from Costco), I decided that since I only have four copies of XP left and that since this machine would have minimal connection to the internet and that I was using this as a basic office machine (Quickbooks, Quickbooks Payroll and a Point of Sale Back Office system), that I would keep Vista and play with it.
Vista doesn't play nice with external storage devices... I had some files I needed to bring over to the machine so I used an external 300GB hard disk and plugged it in. Windows (Vista) saw the portable drive just fine but when I clicked on it to get the files to copy, it hung. For over an hour.
I power-cycled the machine and it offered me the options of a safe boot or to continue booting normally. OK. I chose to boot normally. The boot process is pretty straightforward in 2000 (my favorite) and XP (getting to be a mature Operating System) and is not tender at all -- power cycle and you are back to where you were in a few minutes.
Not so with Vista, the machine went through the low-rez Windows horizontal scrolling thingy and the screen went black. For a few hours.
I was doing some other stuff and when I came back to it, I tried power cycling again. This time it offered to rebuild the Windows Boot System (or something like this). That was still running when I finally left in disgust and went to a meeting and dinner that Jen and I had wanted to go to (for these folks: Sustainable Connections)
This system is less than 48 hours old. All that I have done is uninstall McAffee, the Modem software, Real Player, Yahoo toolbar and the MS Office 2007 demo and to install Quickbooks 2007 and MS Office 2003 (my last copy -- arrrggghhhhh!!!!)
I had not installed any additional hardware (no printers), all of the drivers are from HP as installed by them, the software was a minimal install (no Payroll, no POS back office stuff) Windows Vista should not have failed so poorly.
Looks like I am down to three copies of Windows XP...
If I didn't have to be in Bellingham tomorrow morning, I'd be hitting the single malt right about now.
And, as an ex-MSFT employee (bluebadge and member of the Windows 2000 ship team), I'm feeling really let down and embarassed. And glad that I still have a couple copies of XP left.
