Vista Woes

I visited my friend Pat in Chicago over the weekend. It was a blast. Chicago is a really nice city, with really great people, and most of the time I was there, had a Seattle-like feel, especially the weather. Anyway. While I was there I discovered that Windows Vista Beta 2 has been released for public download. Being without my Microsoft corpnet access these days, I jumped on the opportunity. Plus, Pat wanted to find out if his DonorQuest software would run on Windows Vista; it did. All that aside, Vista is like a really cute blonde twink, pretty but dumb. All the window trimmings run great on my brand new laptop with its ample graphics processing capability. That is, if you can ignore the fact that the explorer crashes all the time, that the beta version of Media Center is essentially useless, and that every 10 seconds, the explorer is stopping to ask you a security question. So to my Alma Matter, you have about 6 months to get this right before you hit the latest slipped ship date. I really hope you make it because it still seems like you’ve got a long way to go.

By the way, one of the best things about a Dell laptop is that they don’t give you your recovery CD unless you call them and order it (for those non-techies, I am being facetious here). If you do manage to hose the Dell boot records by installing another operating system like I did, the PC restore partition on your hard drive is lost like genie in a bottle. Thankfully, I found a wonderful tool on the Internet to fix my problem (God bless Google “lost access dell pc restore partition”) while the Dell tech support folks were useless. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, this worked like a charm: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/.