More About Vista

My Canon scanner does funky things in Vista that it never did before like scanning everything as a negative. For example a text page comes out as white print on a black page. As with PrintShop problems, rebooting usually clears the problem.

The worst problem I have had with Vista is file destruction. In the beginning I lost a significant amount of work when Vista decided it didn’t like a particular file. Everyone’s a critic, right?

It seems that Vista is quite paranoid. I work on the computer both at home and at my store. I carry files back and forth on a flash stick.

Whenever I insert the flash stick, Vista issues a security warning and asks if I want it to fix the problem. Now I ignore that warning. If I open files from the flash stick or save to it, the real fun begins.

Vista is very suspicious of my flash stick. I would be willing to swear that no one touched it but me and that it was never out of my sight, but Vista doesn’t even ask.

If I try to open a file directly from the stick or save directly to the stick, Vista comes in like Homeland Security and whisks away any “suspicious” files. I mean they totally disappear! There is no sign of them anywhere.

They’re not in the garbage can where I could fish them out. They can’t be recovered by Norton. They are GONE!

Now I use a system of triple redundancy. I NEVER open or save directly to my flash stick. I copy the files I want to work on from the stick to the Vista desktop and when I’m done with them I save them to Documents on my hard drive and then copy them back to the stick.

Finally I delete the copies from my junked-up desktop. When I get to the store, I reopen the files and save another copy to my hard drive there. It’s a significant waste of time. Aren’t computers supposed to allow us to work faster and more efficiently?

Thank goodness that Vista is compatible with my 2003 versions of Word and Excel, because I’ve tried free trials of the 2007 versions and I’m not in the least interested.

You know the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I guess Microsoft doesn’t.

Fortunately for me, my new computer came with dual 500GB hard drives. Since the D: drive is completely empty, my IT department (my husband) will do its best to make my computer a dual boot system with XP on the second drive. Once I reinstall all my graphics programs on the XP drive, I anticipate no more problems.

For reasons neither of us can understand, we were unable to create a dual boot system with Vista on one disk and XP on another.

So we formatted the D: drive and did a fresh install of Vista on it - something that's allegedly impossible to do. After re-installing our programs we found some that simply won't work.

However, for those that do work, the problems we had have more or less resolved themselves.

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