Vista upgrade - grrrr!

I upgraded to windows Vista over the weekend and have had plenty of grief and it will take a while to get back to where I get everything functioning properly. The good news is that I loaded Vista onto two machines and neither crashed. But boy was it a mess. Initially, neither machine could load Internet Explorer or download my email, and my network crashed and couldn't make contact. Spysweeeper has been crippled and I think there may be significant problems with System Suite, but haven't had time to check. Quicken is also partially screwed up. Who knows what lurks ahead. I haven't had time to do much checking.

By the way, if you use Libronix Bible software and want to use IE7 (how's that for making this post relevant to Bible and History?) you need to get an upgrade from Libronix. It's free.

After running a Roadrunner utility on one of the machines, IE 7 worked. On the other machine, I spent several hours with tech support tracking down the cause. It turned out that OmniPro 12 (a text scanner program) prevented IE7 from loading and I had to remove the program. After that, IE7 worked. (For weird, however, while IE7 wouldn't function, Netscape did, but Vista wouldn't let me make it the default browswer.) I can understand why the horribly designed Microsoft Operating System structure could break other programs , I can't understand why other programs should break the newly installed operating system. But the OS software is such a collection of glitches and spaghetti code I guess there is room for disaster in both directions.

The tech team helped me to get the network back up and fully functional.

The ABSOLUTE MOST HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE had to do with email. I have used MSN mail for years and years, and liked my simple email address. Suddenly, Microsoft decided that with the launch of Vista, MSN no longer allows email downloads to the computer. You must go to the web site and read and store on the web. So thousands of organized emails on my computer would have to be separated from the new emails stored on the web. And there doesn't seem to be any way to bring your email down to your computer in a simple manner in case you want to save it on your home computer. This change appears to effect all email readers. Eudora couldn't get access either. For me, this is totally unacceptable. I am now in the slow and difficult process of changing my default email to my Road Runner account. But my old email address is embedded in hundreds of sites, contacts, and service providers over the years. In addition, there was no clear public announcement that this was the case and none of the Vista reviews that I read mentioned this change over (although technically it's not a Vista issue.) I spent several hours trying to solve the problem, unaware of this change. After several levels of MSN tech support, I was told to contact Vista support (MSN tech support apparently didn't know about its own changeover.) The Vista tech support, after much research, finally told me that MSN was no longer an http site and I couldn't download email from there anymore. Glad everyone was on the same page with this change.

Thanks Microsoft. WOW is right.