The Unloading Zone: I sold a Krugerrand and Bought a new PC with a Gay Operating System

After the 4th time my dusty old computer crashed in an hour, I gave up, sold a Krugerrand (I may be at a low point now, but I invested wisely when times were good) and bought a new PC. And yes, it came with Vista. It is amazingly fast compared to "old faithful" and I haven't even installed the extra memory yet.

I'm not real comfortable with the look of Vista. XP Pro was a "manly" OS. It was straight-forward, black and white, "I'm your OS, for better or worse". Vista is kind of feminine looking, with soft pastels and rounded corners. How are you supposed to yell at your PC when it looks like a girl? Bill Gates' Apple Envy is going too far. Vista is also not that intuitive. Like any real man, I don't read tutorials and it took me a lot longer to figure stuff out than it should have. I suppose I'll get used to it.

I bought a copy of Office 2007 Pro on eBay at a good price.....hopefully it will show up and be the real deal. After I bought it, I re-read the description of what comes with it and I suddenly realized that Frontpage wasn't included. The MS Publisher description talked about doing web pages in Publisher, so is Frontpage gone or just something ELSE I'll have to buy. I like Frontpage and I'll miss it.

ZoneAlarm was very helpful in getting me a Vista-Compatible version of their Security Suite to replace my XP version. Kudos to them! I still have some other peripherals that will need updated drivers so we'll see how that goes.

I haven't decided on a printer yet. I want color but photo-quality laser would cost another Krugerrand so I'm going ink jet. I went to Fry's and they had a refurbed Epson on sale for $50. Then I went to their website and they had, for the same $50, a refurbed Epson 3 models up! Don't their Buyers talk to each other? I'm not real happy about that. I'm checking eBay and Dealnews for $100 ink jets but am in no immediate rush as I have nothing to print. Once Office 2007 Pro arrives (hopefully), then I'll get the printer. And I just realized I lost all my saved mail and contacts in Outlook because I forgot to back up my .pst file (or however you do it). Once Office and Outlook 2007 arrive, I'm going to have to hook Old Faithful back up and figure that one out. Great. That's why I mostly use Hotmail....let my mail stay on someone else's server nice and safe, while I can access it from any PC with internet access. I use Gmail for this blog, but don't really like it. Of course, I never read the tutorial. Outlook I only used for........job searching and related stuff. Great.

I did not enjoy the whole "new computer" process because I don't like selling Krugerrands. This should be a fun experience, but spending money is not fun right now. It feels wrong...like I don't deserve it. And while I can at least justify it on need, it still doesn't feel right.

UPDATE TO POST: 7/22/2007: OK, so I've been using Vista for a while now at home and XP Pro at the office. Vista does do some things that annoy me and I still can't bring myself to read the manual, but you what: the "gay" color scheme is growing on me. It's actually soothing. I guess when it comes to operating systems, I've come out of the closet! Stop me before I buy an Apple!!!!

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