The Blog Pages of Kellan Meig'h

The trials and tribulations of Windows Vista Home Basic

Do you use Vista?

I decided about a year ago that I would purchase a laptop for my writing. I diligently saved up my nickels and dimes until I had a small sum of currency set aside for the venture to come. I began to search around for the best bang for the economy buck, only to discover the fact that I would have to drive about 35 miles to reach a kiosk that allowed me to order a Dell^© laptop. To be specific, it's a Dell^© Inspiron 1501 with a 120Gb Hdd, 2Gb of RAM (now) and a CD burner/DVD Rom combo.

Before you email me to chastize the old warhorse for purchasing a Dell^©, let me point out that I am more than pleased with its function. It did have a few shortcomings, however. It came with only 1Gb of RAM that I had to upgrade to 2Gb almost immediately. Vista is a RAM hog, I will point out. The other issue was with Vista itself. Some of our programs wouldn't run on Vista at all so we had to search out replacement programs to get back into the swing of things.

So where am I going with this, you ask? I was around computers before the personal computer was a viable option. There was DOS and a crude MS Windows OS that rode on top of DOS. How many of you remember typing "win" and hitting return to start windows? With every new iteration of Windows, more new features were brought out to make us more productive along with new bugs to make us horrified at the different ways we could accidentally invoke the 'BSOD', the blue screen of death that meant the OS had crashed and you were looking at a reboot at the every least with all of your hard-hacked data corrupted or just plain missing in action.

So what does this have to do with the price of oil in the middle east, you ask? I had my first BSOD out of Vista tonight. It rebooted after this funky blue screen with unreadable text on it came up. I ran all of my diagnostic tools on the Ol' Inspiron laptop only to be told it was in good working order. Oh Well, the more I use Vista, the more accustomed I get to its quirks. Only time will tell if I do the ultimate upgrade to it; Windows XP or some flavor of Linux.

As always, email the old warhorse HERE with your comments.

Kellan