Running away from Vista

Give me a hammer, and the first thing I'll do is break my skanky old laptop PC, a work substitute. Time to go shopping for a new one.

Buy a Mac, a friend says. It's better hardware, more user friendly and it doesn't crash. But Mac-tops are delicate sweethearts -- I remember them smashing clean on one fall in journalism school. It just can't operate on the field like a Panasonic Toughbook or IBM T40 (a standard issue at work).

As a wire service guy, I need great stability, mobility and great battery life. A failed PC could cost me a job. I need to self-fix it on the fly. No IS department will fly in to help on the road.

Then hang on till summer, friend said, when Apple comes out with its new operating system and supporting hardware. Good try, but a Mac is a Mac, I can't see its use on the road, especially if it breaks down and costs me my job.

So I looked into Windows Vista PCs, recently launched, and found these interesting aspects which make it useless for laptop:

-> It needs a major investment in new hardware, especially for small, portable laptops.
-> Vista could sap up more battery life than XP. It's more demanding, and needs more hardware to operate.
-> It doesn't support all standard programs yet.
-> It's still incomplete, open to viruses though hardware vendors may claim otherwise.
-> I just understand XP very well and can fix issues quickly, or call someone to fix stuff. As long as I can file and edit a story and it works, I'm happy. It's not worth spending hours trying to fix a Vista problem, not worth it.

If it's a home PC, sure, I'd try Vista. But not as a portable, tiny laptop that I use as a work substitute. But if I were to buy a home PC, why not buy a Mac instead?

But what pisses me off even more -- I can't find a brand new laptop from Dell or HP that has XP. Microsoft is forcing Vista on us, taking advantage of us, just the f***ing way I don't want it.

But I could be wrong. If Microsoft didn't develop Vista with laptops and portability in mind, they certainly were dumb.

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