ON UPGRADING TO VISTA
Please check the evening news in your area for some very disturbing footage of me, atop a water tower somewhere, picking off random pedestrians with a sniper rifle as the SWAT Team rolls up and tries-- unsuccessfully-- to coax me down. I shall probably be wearing my tinfoil hat, which covers the bare spots on my scalp where I've torn out clumps of my own hair this past several hours.
Aggravated? Oh, just a little fucking bit. I've upgraded from Windows XP to VISTA, and am having numerous problems getting things to work, and receiving all sorts of incompatability messages.
"Use the Help and Support center to get answers to all your questions", it says. None of the HELP files will even open. "Internet Explorer cannot download from HELP. The fIle is either unavailable or site is busy. Try again later", it's said... for 3 days, now! A web search indicates that Microsoft apparently stopped including the .exe program that reads their own damn 32-bit .hlp files in their operating system software... wait for it.....starting with VISTA!
That information is pretty well buried on their website, and when you dig for an answer to the installation problems it poses, they offer a couple of pretty inscrutable downloads that, so far, have done exactly Jack shit for me, in terms of making anything accessible or readable.
I get error messages that say: "Everything you know is wrong. Nothing you have will work. All the things you will now try to accomplish will fail, miserably, engendering even more insulting and uncomprehensible error messages like this one. None of your programs or applications will function properly and you'll have to buy brand new everything, you fucking chucklehead. What were you thinking, anyway, that we'd make it easy and pleasant for you to upgrade and change things? We're not in the business of making your life easier of more fulfilling. We're in the business of making you think you have to buy all the latest stuff we put out there, in order that we can suck up more of your hard-earned cash. Your penis is actually getting smaller because you don't yet have OFFICE 2007, did you know that, shithead?"
I think I need to go back to using an abacus, a pencil and maybe a couple of tin cans and a string.
But, gosh-- the desktop is so colorful and glassy-looking...
