Leopard smokes the Vista

My office smelled of smoke this morning, and I knew it wasn't a good sign. A quick check of the air conditioning ducts and I was able to rule out something being on fire, since it was just my office.

Then I noticed it.

My desktop computer, dead to the world. Something fried and went to electronic heaven.

Now, in every crisis lays opportunity, and in this case, that meant buying a new computer, which is always fun. But therein layed a moral quandry of loyalties. A few months ago I switched back to the Mac side of the world at home, could I do it at work too?

Sadly, no. I did look longinly at the iMacs, but there are still some pretty compelling reasons to stick to the Microsoft side of the universe for work.

So, off I lumbered back to my office with a new HP desktop ready to set it up. Keep in mind that I recently had to set up a new Macbook Pro laptop recently, which was a breeze to do.

Microsoft's Vista fails where Apple's Leopard soars: It's a godawful mess of an operating system. You can almost see where engineers sat together in dimly lit rooms saying, "Ooooooh lets make things translucent so people think they look pretty, and let's see how we can clutter the screen with widgets and why don't we hide the shutdown buttons so that anyone already used to our crap systems can figure out how to restart the damn machine when it crashes two minutes into setup."

Yes, it crashed two minutes into setup. To the point I had to shut it down on the box -- even after realizing what the inconspicuous round little power button on the ugly new START menu was for -- because the programs were unresponsive, even after a CTRL-ALT-DEL or two.

I only played around with Vista for a little bit today, and I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'm just amazed how Microsoft took a clean, relatively workable XP and came up with this mess. I may still need my Windows, but my heart is clearly back where it belongs: My Macbook is a worthy successor to my old black-and-white Mac 128k that I loved.

As far as the HP, it will do. I just don't have any grand hopes for it.