Windows 7 was nice. Taking a trip to the near future was quaint despite failing to deliver the ZFS filesystem I’d been promised years ago as well as the virtualized hardware model I read about in 2002 that won’t be out until Midori which may beat the Mayan Apocalypse. The last straws were the idea that I’d probably have to do two reinstalls of an OS before I could call it stable and somewhat hairy nature of the beta video card drivers on which no blu-ray codec could run.  My personal favorite was the three part cycle of errors when I changed microphones. The first told me the existing microphone didn’t exist and I’d have to pick a new one. The second one told me I had two selected and that I’d have to restart. The final one told me the new default device wasn’t valid and it’d default back to the previous device from which I was trying to change. The only way out was to interrupt the 2nd “searching for a solution” dialog, not the first nor third would do.
So I reinstalled Vista and I felt at home again:
- I installed Office 2007 without a registration key, when I entered it after reading the Excel file containing it, the installer started to reinstall, stopped halfway through, said the install failed and then produced the “Successful Installation” dialog.
- Vista would report an error with a hardware device, recommend I update to a new driver and then show me one older than drivers I have.
- Finally, I had to have admin access to remove a shortcut from the desktop.
I have a theory, Microsoft was concerned people found computers intimidating, nothing brings one’s opinion of something else down faster than watching it fail. Vista reminds the user of his or her relative competence in spades. I missed you, Vista.