Counting the days until the next version of Windows

Monday was the last straw for me.

I was at the Manatee County governmental complex, getting ready to live blog a government meeting, and my laptop was giving me fits.

Not the hardware, mind you. It’s an HP and I like working on it. But the operating system is Windows Vista. You know what that means.

Connecting to a network outside of my home network can be an adventure with this system. Once before, it had gotten all “ooh, be careful!” on me, and this time I was in no mood for its nonsense.

Still, I got an “It’s taking a little longer than usual” to connect to the network warning, followed by the dire advice that I was on a public network and someone else could see my computer. Well, I wasn’t going to surf porn, just try to blog during a meeting.

Then, once I finally got connected, I couldn’t access my paper’s admin site. I texted the tech guy at the paper, and he e-mailed me alternate URLs, but he sent them to my company e-mail, which also was inaccessible.

I tried rebooting and lost several minutes as I waited for Vista to start up.

Finally, I got started again. Nothing. No access to my company’s sites.

There was always a brief note about a DNS error at every access attempt. I don’t give a flying %@$#%$ about the error, Vista, just fix it so I can get some work done!!!!! And stop warning me about things I already know about!!!!

I was covering a story a few months ago when I saw someone using a beta version of Windows 7, and asked him about it. He said it was great, worked well and that he definitely planned on buying the release version when it came out. He was even playing a multiplayer network game at the time, and it was working beautifully.

Microsoft is becoming the new IBM with its aggravating software, absurd methods and infuriating warnings.

I will give them my money once more, and this time it better work!