hating Vista

So I bought a new laptop. I got a cheap one, partly because I thought I already had most of the software I needed. It came with Windows Vista.

Why, oh why, does Microsoft do this crap? Why Windows 98, why Millennium Edition, why Vista? Using XP I had almost gotten over my old Mac-user's contempt for them. XP works fine, and the corporate version I use in the office is even better. For the past couple of years I have had no complaints about Windows at all. So why did they change it?

Vista is constantly doing thing I didn't know I had told it to do. It scrolls when I think I am just moving the mouse, it opens things I haven't clicked on, it jumps around in mysterious ways. So I have spent much of the morning surfing web sites with names like "How to Disable Twelve Useless Features in Vista", turning off mysterious functions.

And even if I ever manage to make the system work the way I want it to, it still won't run my old software. Wordperfect 11, my favorite word processor ever, is no more. Sigh.

Why, oh why?