Annoy Me

Before settling on a HP dv9640 laptop, I went through the big Mac vs. Microsoft debate. I asked some Mac users to give me reasons to change over. One of the things that stood out in my head was that ease of use was a big feature, or to quote Porter: "everything just works."

Ultimately, price and Heather's benefit won out and I sit here with my Vista laptop. But I think I'm starting to understand the headaches I was being warned about with Microsoft. This hasn't been a consideration for quite a while, since all I've used is Vista on a desktop and everything is configured the way I like it (aka, working for the most part).

So here's my initial setup troubles:
-Microsoft Outlook from Office XP would not authenticate sending mail. Even Sasktel tech support couldn't help me out. But switch over to Vista's email client and presto, no issues. What a piss off.
-After initializing a home network from my XP desktop for the first time, it said that in order for the network to work correctly for file/printer sharing, I would have to install XP network drivers from the XP cd on my Vista laptop. Is there no suck thing as backwards compatibility?
-I don't know if Microsoft is completely at fault for this, but the windows media plugin for firefox had to be installed manually. Shouldn't this shit come bundled or Firefox be able to install on it's own? I just installed it for hell's sakes.

And just because it knew I was going to bitch about it, I think the laptop stalled on reboot and I sat at a black screen for about three minutes after I logged in. This seems kind of excessive for OS loading time. And can I have something other than blackness please? A flapping Windows flag? Anything?

These Windows boxes had better network easily, otherwise laptop frisbee will become a sport.