I posted the blog below the other day, then promptly deleted it because I felt maybe I was being too hasty.  (I didn't even include my rants about the shitty search function, or how Vista's half-assed attempts to visually ape Apple have done nothing but barfed a bunch of resource hogs onto my lap.)  I've put it back up because Windows Vista just crashed when I TRIED TO OPEN A JPG IMAGE.  Like, open with the default picture viewer.  This is the second time the graphics driver has failed, locking up the computer, except this time it went so far as to blue-screen-icide the whole shebang.  So consider this blog a warning to avoid this unmitigated manure sack at all costs (which is probably somewhere in the area of $200!  HAHAHAHAHAHA!).

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My computer died last week, and I had to reinstall Windows.  So I went to the store and bought fucking VISTA.

Sometimes you read a poorly framed opinion on someone's blog, or a typo-ridden mess of heated Internet-tough-guy-isms on a forum or message board, or the impotent, griping blither of a Myspace bulletin... and sometimes you may picture an overweight, near-sighted white guy with a stupid haircut, in his underwear, quaking with stress, anxiously stabbing a filthy keyboard with sweaty, aching fingers, mere moments from the actual, tangible possibility losing it to nerd-rage, fevered and helpless, desperately trying to encapsulate the total breadth and scope of their venom, aimed at a phantom, anonymous target.  Right?

HI!

Why didn't I just stick with Windows XP?  Everything worked before.  I was still able to run the few programs I used without trudging through shady forum posts and BUY NOW TO SEE THE RESOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM sites to find patches and workarounds with an estimated 50% success rate.  I could connect my digital camera and retrieve my photos.  In spite my trashy organizational sense, I could easily navigate through the honeycombs of my folder system.  I didn't need to run programs "as an Administrator", part of a series of irrelevant features that you'd expect in an office with multiple computers connected to one network, and not the bare-bones, sweet-little-old-lady-who-only-logged-on-with-it-to-church-on-Sundays edition.  I didn't need any improvements in the areas of CONNECTIVITY or ACCESSIBILITY.  I had a set of tools that each worked, not an all-in-one clusterfuck for every single motherfucking folder on the entire machine.  And I didn't have to answer to three prompts to open the same program I was just using five minutes ago.

I switched to the "Windows Classic" visual theme right at the beginning, so it's not just that.  On XP, everything was still ugly, but I was easily able to make it conform to my own personal aroma of ugly.