Steve Litchfield

What a farce. We were trying to buy an item from Ikea, the Swedish furniture empire. Turns out they have an online shop. Good-oh. Turns out they deliver to my area. Good-oh x2. So I started filling in the login/delivery forms on the shopping basket/checkout system. I entered all my card details and hit 'Submit'. 10 seconds later I see the above error. Hmm.... Not good. I phone the number and the guy says 'Are you trying to use our online shop using a laptop?' What? Why on earth should that make a difference? 'Ah, he says, our system doesn't work with laptops'. But, I spluttered, that should make no difference whatsoever. Don't you mean that it doesn't work well with err.... Vista? I said, striking out in the dark? 'Ah yes, it also doesn't work with Vista or Firefox. Or laptops' he said. I asked if I could give the phone guy my order instead. 'Oh no, we don't take phone orders'. Quite staggering. I'm trying to give this com...

I'm not totally, totally sold on Microsoft's vista yet, but I have to say that, despite the eye candy and despite the wierd way in which some things happen (disappearing 'recently-used' app shortcuts, anyone?), some of its technology does make things easier. The file indexing got turned back on and, after its initial hammering of my disk, seems to have settled down and made things faster and better. The way I can plug in almost any device and the drivers get installed invisibly and automatically is wonderful. And innovations like ReadyBoost, using a USB flash drive as a fast 'disk cache' help on my laptop to keep the main RAM running smoothly. The biggest surprise was that all my applications from my XP era have installed and worked well, with only a very few minor problems. It's still early days, but the tipping point is upon me and I suspect it'll be Vista most of the way home from here.

Watching The Matrix Reloaded yesterday in the same week as I acquired a Windows Vista laptop was slightly surreal. After 4 days battle against 'helper' services and programs whose main purpose was to swallow processor cycles and RAM and generally get in the way, it was amusing to hear the 'Oracle' talking about programs that are written to do this and that and generally not be noticed. I'm sure Microsoft intended most Vista services to not be noticed, but in the real world on less than cutting edge hardware the constant hard disk access and processor/RAM hit is very noticeable. And now I've ended up with a Vista laptop that's configured like XP and runs only 20% or slow slower. Why didn't I get a XP-running laptop in the first place? Because you can't buy these for love nor money.... Sigh. On the bright side, Vista's device discovery and driver installation has been great. No printer driver CDs or trying to find CDs for every other accessory acqu...