I bought a new Sony laptop. I like Sony because any Sony I have ever owned has worked until the day I got rid of it, sometimes for decades.  They are a quality name brand.

Anyway, the new laptop came with Vista installed.  So, okay, I figured I might as well accept the change…after all, newer is better, right?

OMG…Vista is simply horrible.  It is an Operating System written by geeks for geeks.  Now I am forced to understand administrative rights and read/write permissions and a ton of geeky stuff that I never had to know in any previous Microsoft OS.  And, for the record, I don’t want to know it.  I just want to read my email, post my blog, and run some occasional apps.  It is no longer fun.

Vista continually asks me for permission to run what I want it to run.  I am the administrator…I shouldn’t have to give permission when I want to run my programs.

Vista won’t download.  When I try, it tells me I don’t have permission.  From whom?  To do what?  Very sucky.

And lockups!!!  OMG…this system will lockup solid just by looking at it the wrong way!  Really, using IE or Firefox and clicking a little too quickly on links will lock the system so tightly that even Ctrl-Alt-Del fails to work.  You are forced to do a hard re-boot, which naturally entails all the funky blue screens the next time you boot up.

Okay, so I finally had enough of Vista’s horrific, unfriendly behavior so I decided to go to the Sony web site and get the XP drivers so I could reformat the hard drive and install my good old reliable XP Pro.  Well, guess what…Sony, obviously in cahoots with Microsoft, doesn’t have XP drivers for this laptop.  Sony, Sony, Sony…for the first time since I was born, you have disappointed me royally.  You should simply and naturally assume that there will be a breadth of users out here in the real world who have a breadth of operating system requirements, and support your product(s) with appropriate drivers for any of them, or at least the most widely used.  But no, so sorry, Vista only.

Well, I am undeterred.  Sony, your challenge has been accepted…I have started my search for the myriad of required XP drivers from Intel and others as to make my Sony laptop work the way is should have worked out of the box.  Reliably.  Easily.  Ungeekably.  A happy, friendly experience.  In other words, without Vista.  Once I have the required driver sets, and my laptop is working under XP, I will return and post the places where I found all of the appropriate drivers.  Because, if you have found this post, you are probably going through something like I am.  And, since Sony (bad, bad Sony!) isn’t going to step up to the plate any time soon, we need to take appropriate action to support ourselves.

And, if you have ALREADY gone through this nightmare yourself and found some good drivers, pass them along to me so I can post them here (and give you some well deserved credit).

Mr. Gates, I do respect you and the work you have done in the past, but you really slipped up with the Vista operating system.  The cool dude in the Apple commercial is right…Vista is really bad.  You truly need to do some serious backpeddling to recover from this horrible OS, because I am very representative of the baby boom demographic, and I can guarantee you if I am unhappy with you, so are MILLIONS of others.  Vista sucks.  Either pull it off of the shelves, or rejoice in the sound of millions of MS Vista users swinging over to Apple OS.

Did I mention that Vista sucks?  Just checking…