Does Buying Vista Mean I’m Insane?

I don’t know what it was, but I went crazy after Thanksgiving this year. The whole Black Friday bug bit me, and I spent a lot of money on new furniture and toys.

Okay, one new toy. A new computer.

It’s running Windows Vista.

What in the world was I thinking!?

Everything I’ve been reading about Vista tells me that it’s buggy and no where near backwards compatible. I just didn’t think I’d buy anything dealing with Vista until next year, at the earliest. “Let ‘em sort out more o’ them ish-ooos!” was my motto. The Black Friday bug got me instead. That’s my trouble. (My apologies to Jim Hensen.)

Why do they call it Black Friday anyway? The store’s finances certainly operate “in the black” on that day. It makes mine “go into the red.”

Here’s my excuse.

We have a family computer in our house. It’s in the living room so that we can easily monitor what my children are doing on the web. There are two other computers set up in the house (and about three more that aren’t). The computer in my music studio, and my daughter’s computer that we got her to encourage her story writing.

The family computer was getting old and out of shape (much like I am). It just wasn’t doing what we needed it to do anymore, and it was getting harder and harder to deal with its aging idiosyncrasies. Older hardware and newer programs will do that to you.

So we got a new one. I got a pretty good deal, too.

Now, because of backward compatibility issues, I’ve had to change my ISP (I’m not kidding), and less than half of the kid’s programs I’ve tried to install will run on it.

And I’ve only tried installing a few of them.

Oh, well. There is one upside. Vista has some killer parental controls. Now my kids will have a lot harder time sneaking time on the computer if we don’t want them to.

Now if I can just figure out how to get Writer Girl to turn off her computer and go to bed.