Five months it's been since I last sounded off here. I mentioned the impending move which took place in January and it's been a wild ride from then till now. The move took the better part of a week and it was one grueling week. The problem stemmed from a genetic condition that both my wife and I suffer from called Packratitis. As a direct result of this condition it seems that we had not thrown anything away in the twenty eight odd years that we lived in the old house. We filled a thirty yard, and a sixteen yard dumpster and made many plus trips to the dump in my over loaded pickup. Here we are in late April and I sent my son to the dump again with a load. We are still paring down possessions that we really don't need and, more importantly, we have no room for. We went from a two story, three bedroom colonial with an attic, basement, garage and two large sheds, to a double wide mobile home with a small shed. You get the picture, and in the end, the stuff we are ditching really is junk.

There was one serious casualty from the move, however, that has also contributed to my extended hiatus from this, my blog, and that was my desktop PC. It was somehow dropped during the move and suffered irreparable damage. It was a total loss and, up until tax return time a few short weeks ago, we were not able to afford a new one. What became evident once I did get the new unit up and running was that the unfortunate demise of the old one was a double tragedy in that I could not find a system that came with XP on it. I was forced to accept Vista Home Premium and that is the basis of this current rant.

At this point I am seriously considering wiping Vista from the computer and buying a copy of XP to replace it. I am frustrated and mightily pissed off that Microsoft is ramming this "Beta" operating system down we, the consumer's, throats when there is so much wrong with it. Nearly every program, game, and utility that I own turns out to be incompatible with Vista. The very first day that I had the new computer, a very good HP Pavilion, I could not download updates from HP because my HP computer, that came with Vista Home Premium, was not compatible with Vista Home Premium. I had to contact HP, via email, and wait three days for a reply and a link to a patch to make my brand new HP Pavilion compatible with the operating system that came preloaded on it.

Over the years I have amassed many hundreds of dollars worth of PC games and utilities that are now worthless. I've managed to find Vista patches for a very few of them and even then, some of those still do not work. I have a stack of mini DV tapes on my desk that I can do nothing with because my camcorder is not compatible with Vista. The camcorder manufacturer is supposed to be coming out with a patch in the near future, but there is no guarantee that it will work. Many of my on line subscription sites are not compatible with Vista and my external back up drive is not compatible with Vista.

There are many online Vista tutorial sights that I'm afraid to try and access in case they are not compatible with Vista, and I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I am simply not compatible with Vista!