A Half-Assed Return to One Reporter's Opinion

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been pressed into service to help out with a couple of computer issues with members of my extended family. Not that I'm not happy to help out - I do know my stuff when it comes to navigating either PCs or Macs, and I give far, far better advice and support than your typical jamokes on first-level call at Dell or the Geek Squad.

But I had my first "opportunity" to mess with Windoze Vista the other day, and my curiosity got piqued. I can't help it. I'm inclined to try to figure these things out and work with them and massage them, make them a tall drink and get them all a' tizz... but I reveal too much.

I gotta say (and I say this as a former MCSE and reformed Windows bigot) that Vista is an ungodly godawful goddamned mess of an OS. It's klunky and bitchy and hypersensitive and far too boorish for words. It's fat and sluggish and pretends to be something that it's not. Vista is the beer-drunk of operating systems.

That didn't stop me from buying a copy at the CompUSA fire-sale and doing my best to set it up on my MacPro to run in Parallels. I got it to run, but it did involve a couple of gyrations that would be unseemly to admit to here. I'll let the guys at Daily Tech explain how I might have gotten this to work as an adjunct to my Windows 2000 emulator.

I mean, really, people. Does it take 10GB to run an Intel platform? My sources say no - Linux has been grinding happily at many Pentium-class processors for a half of a generation now. Mac OSX 10.5 is around 6GB at a full install; less if you strip out all of the languages you probably won't need (thank you, Monolingual).

But at least I'll be able to sit at my computer and figure out what my mom is talking about when she's trying to get her new laptop to talk to her printer over an ad-hoc wireless LAN. That alone was worth $120 to me, even if it was for this PO/S that will see maybe five hours usage in the next 12 months.