Hasta la Vista

I love Betas. Any Microsoft Beta program I can get signed up for, I'll devote a few hours a week in the name of playing with the software, finding bugs, and learning new features. Well, except in the case of Exchange Betas where I end up spending many hours a week working on it. I have been playing with the Vista client software for almost a year on test systems. I decided it was finally time to put it to work on my desktop.

On Tuesday of this past week, in a fit of optimism I blew away my production desktop machine and installed Windows Vista Ultimate (I downloaded the most current bits from the Beta site.) Yes, it looks very nice. It has some spiffy features. The new IE 7.0 with tabbed browsing is nice (gee, reminds me of Firefox.)

On Wednesday, I spent much of my free time getting Office 2007 configured. Also tried to get my HP Scanner software and network printer software to work. On Thursday, I spent a good chunk of the day trying unsuccessfully to get Adobe Acrobat 6.0 to work. I create quite a few PDFs and my scanner scans to PDF. No luck. Nor with my DVD Authoring software.

On Friday, I once again tried to get sound to come out of my computer. The sound card device driver works fine, but no sound ever comes out. I did not realize just how dependent I was on listening to music.

On Saturday, with refreshed optimizing I scoured the Beta newsgroups, but found no solutions. Spent several hours looking for alternate software/drivers for my sound card. Once again tried Acrobat. Once again tried my DVD software. And I have not even tried to install all of the other software I use less frequently.

At 6:00PM, I started re-installing Windows XP. I have work I need to get done. I certainly feel the frustration of some Microsoft customers. I sure hope I don't have to buy new Acrobat software, scanner software, and a sound card. I'll look forward to Beta 3 or Release Candidate 1.