The Wow Starts Here!

Wow, with the new Windows Operating System that has changed my life, I am now a new man. I lack stress in my life, I have a new found sense of achievement and I am more productive with my time. Here is a picture of myself and the lovely wife after installing Windows Vista for the very first time. We were on top of the world.

If only we could have seen the bastard smash into smitherines at the bottom of this **@$ing mountain. Let the wow start there Bill Bloody Gates! Crikey, if anyone can screw up a perfectly good day, its Microsoft right? Well er, not exactly. Before you all go off venting your spleens over Microsoft's latest bungle, take a deep breath and think of Windows XP, ok now take another deep breath and think of that paradise wallpaper in XP instead. Calm thoughts wash over your mind... Now I think it helps to realise that a). No operating system is perfect, b). We all need a computer to blame stuff on and c). Perhaps it's not really the Operating System at all that is to blame here.

Here's my biggest problems with the average computer users, or the laypersons (in general)...

They cannot appreciate the incredible complexity of the development of computer based software. Remember folks, its not an exact science, its more like trial and error and patching up holes in a bucket that leaks forever, because some bastard keeps poking holes in it. Now some die hard hackers would argue that they are merely exposing the holes already within microsoft's bucket, but lets face it, you can poke a hole in any bucket if you try hard enough and poke around in the right places.

Getting back on the subject, Vista is here and it's here to stay. I am wondering if it will have the same longevity as Windows XP, but one thing is for sure, it will challenge the way we see desktop computing as a whole. Vista is able to integrate into the family lifestyle much easier than any other OS. While Windows 95 revolutionised gaming on the PC, Vista is set to revolutionise the home entertainment system as a whole.

Ages ago, roughly 2001 -at a function for IT dudes (maybe a Canon product launch I think) some old dude predicted that the home PC, as we know it would become extinct... He concluded that he had seen a demonstration of how the home PC would be fallen and evolve into the all around entertainment hub of the home. In fact he predicted that the whole house would be computer controled... The fridge, the hot water, the washing machine, the toaster and so on... Now his timing was way off as he predicted that this would all happen before 2007, but his point was not lost on us. The PC is evolving. It is becoming more dynamic, more flexible in it's role in the home. It is definately taking on the role of entertainment centre, but I think that it will be a long time before we will be plugging in 'Matrix' style and uploading programs directly into our little skulls. As for the toaster, I doubt that a computer could improve it all that much...

I shudder to think of the possibilities of a kitchen run by windows... Imagine waking up to the Blue Screen of death flashing at you instead of the clock radio alarm tuned to your favorite radion station, as you stumble to the electronic kitchen. Imagine your toast burning due to a compatibility issue it has with the kind of bread you bought at the supermarket. You have to dowload updates just to get the milk out of the fridge and your coffee machine has crashed again! Cursing, you pull out the newspaper on your tablet PC that is built into your breakfast bar, only to find that it has a virus and has turned the thermostat up on your fridge. As you pour your lumpy offish milk into your half brewed coffee, you wonder why you ever threw those old appliances away. Sure they're crude, but hey... They work, unlike windows Vista at the moment.

So there is this customer that bought this rather flash PC from us. It started out like this....

Then we transformed it to this....

And now that she proved to be such a pain in the arse, it looks like this again...

Now don't get me wrong... i love Vista really, I think there are some fantastic improvements. But If you have old stuff that you want to hang on to and it all works fine on your Pentium 3, Pentium 4, or your Athlon XP, FFS: keep it that way, cause' if the Wow starts here, you aint gonna see nothing but Woe baby...

My point being... If it aint broke, don't fix it.