I was given a new laptop a couple of weeks ago and decided to throw caution to the wind, live in the moment, and install Windows Vista on the thing. Amid general worry and doubt in the media and even in the Nulli Office, I took the leap. After all, I figured I could always just throw my hands up in the air and revert in high dudgeon, like Chris Pirillo did. Melodrama and Vista seem to go together no matter what the outcome.

Installation of the OS, Office 2007, and Virtual PC 2007 were a breeze. Everything just worked. Hmph.

I waited excitedly to see the wife throttle the paperboy. That was a non-event too. A frequent non-event, but a non-event just the same. The most annoying holdups are when I try to edit/rename/move files that I don’t own – but wait, that’s just MS finally catching up with everyone else. All the other OS’s have been annoying on that count forever.

Slowly it began to dawn on me that my big chance at histrionics was a total dud.

Once I found the Run icon (buried in the accessories folder), figured out I could right-click something and run it as Administrator where needed, and learned that you have to hit the ALT key to see the File menu in Windows Explorer, life was pretty good.

VPC2007 ran all of my VMs without complaint, including my Mandrake 10 & Ubuntu edgy eft (edit: ha had efty edge there, gotta love friday entries) machines. They all ran MUCH faster than on VPC2004, and at the time I had half the memory in the machine too.

And Office 2007 is BEAUTIFUL. Especially Excel. If you introduced me to the developer who set it up so that you could merge two cells on a row and then insert a column in between and have the merged cells just stretch to encompass that new column cell, you would have a hard time keeping me from kissing his feet. I almost cried the first time it happened.

Can you believe it, such a juicy subject and not one complaint to report. My new machine starts in a tiny fraction of the time the old one did, and it does everything my old machine could do, but much more fashionably. I feel seriously put out.

I’ll just have to go find a rant somewhere else, I guess. Mostly they seem to find me, so I don’t suppose I’ll be bereft for long :)