Windows Vista Pain and Agony
I'm no fan of Macs (twice the money for half the performance, and if
their interfaces are intuitive, then I've got a defective intuition),
but recent experiences with Microsoft do lend some credence to their
appeal. (And their amusing ads sure do hit home.) I recently bought my
husband a new PC, because apparently 256Mb of RAM was no longer
sufficient for someone who basically just uses AOL and IE. These days,
what with Vista and all the bloatware that Windows drags along and the
pervasive-ware of Windows apps (is there no such thing as a simple app
anymore? must every little thing install itself into my system tray,
plug itself in to my explorer toolbar, and start as soon as my system
boots?), it seems a hi-speed Pentium-4 processor with 1Gb of RAM is a
minimal configuration for your most basic home user. I was curious to
see what Vista was like. As I expected, it's got a few cool new
gadgets, but it's impossible to find anything because they've
rearranged all the menus, control panels, and even the way the
explorer looks and works. There's nothing compellingly better about
it, it's just different for the sake of being different. (Fortunately,
there's a "classic view" option on the Control Panel, at least.)
I did get it set up without too much pain, and aside from the fact
that Vista is still bleeding new, and Vista device drivers aren't
available for everything yet, it's been running well enough for the
first month. Until today. This morning my husband calls me in a panic,
saying he can't log in because it's giving him a message saying
"Invalid product key - Windows activation required". Vista has a
thorough security feature that helps Microsoft stop pirated copies of
Windows. They spin it as a protection for the user ("you'll know
you've got an authentic copy of Windows"), but of course it's really
all about protecting Microsoft. For the user, all it is is something
else to go wrong, and when it does, it's a royal pain in the butt to
sort out. OEMs like HP/Compaq pre-install Windows and pre-activate it
(which entails entering absurdly long strings of digits), sparing
their customers a tedious out-of-the-box experience. Unfortunately,
Vista has a bug where installing certain software or turning the
machine off at the wrong time or various other innocent actions can
cause Vista to lose its factory-installed product key, and to think
that it's a pirated copy, locking down your computer. Microsoft
recognizes this bug and offers a patch for it on their support site.
Which would be nifty, except that Microsoft doesn't allow your
computer to download anything from its support site unless you're
running a "genuine" copy of Windows. So in other words, the only
computers that will be able to download the patch are the ones that
don't have the bug. How brilliant is that? We tried an option to
manually re-enter the product key (a 25-character code found on a
sticker near the back of the computer), which failed. So we tried an
alternate option to get a "confirmation code" by speaking a
54-digit(!) code into a voice response system. That too failed, and we
ended up speaking to a live Microsoft technician. After two more
failed attempts, and several reboots, he was able to give us a correct
54-digit code that enabled the computer. (You think a 16-digit credit
card number is easy to mix up over the phone, try a 54-digit number!)
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