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THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW
Unless you are an early-technology adopter with a stomach for un-explained errors and exceptions on the most mundane of tasks, please stay away from Windows Vista. My husband considered himself to be of such caliber until he was met with Vista.

BUT IF YOU INSIST TO READ ON

JUNK YOUR OLD PRINTERS
We had two HP printers, a Laser Jet and an Ink Jet, neither had driver support for Vista. Microsoft's answer to the problem - it's the hardware vendor's fault dummy, to not be ready for Vista. Typical monopolistic attitude I'd say, but we didn't give up on the operating system right away. Drudging on as early technology adopters we dealt with the situation by printing everything from our laptop which was XP while hoping for a better day.

BROKEN PICTURE VIEWER
The picture viewer that came with the operating system didn't work one bit. When trying to open a JPG file, it gave me an ugly application error then crashed. That gave me very little confidence about the rest of the operating system. My work around was to drag-and-drop everything into IE directly (at least the browser works if nothing else!)

BE READY TO JUNK PRETTY MUCH ALL OF YOUR OLD SOFTWARE
That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

WHERE IS MY SOUND
If I can't look at pictures with ease, print documents or use my old software, at least let me listen to some music. But guess what? My sound card stopped working too. I've transitioned from shock to numbness. With the shrug of a shoulder I was determined to not give up. The proper Vista driver I did find, but the installation took so many iterations of install, re-install and registry key deletions that I was shocked when it finally started working. Alas I was still not convinced that the driver worked 100% because it didn't go through like a perfect install.

JUNK YOUR MP3 PLAYER WHILE YOU'RE AT IT
I'm a fan of Rhapsody, Real Network's mp3 subscription plan. Well you can guess, of course it doesn't work with Windows Vista, neither the online music player worked, nor did the client for downloading songs worked. Okay perhaps this is more of Real Network's problem than Microsoft's, but what good is an operating system if there is no software that supports it?

WHAT'S LEFT
Lots of useless bells and whistles like the desktop widgets that you can download to track stock, listen to Internet Radio stations, etc. I can do that on my Google home page just fine without having to download anything to my computer where before each download I am warned of the danger of trusting third-party software. They do have a cool way of displaying many browser windows in a compact almost three dimensional way, but it's weird enough to make me miss the simple tab days.

CONCLUSION
A few months passed with no printer and many unsightly workarounds. We're back to XP.
I told you the beginning was all you needed to know.

Learn more about this author, Jillian Zabelin.
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