a technology tangent

So, my parents got a new computer for the holidays. 24 inch wide-screen monitor, ridiculously big hard drive, more RAM than they really need... and Windows Vista. I’ve only been working with it for a few days, and already I think I might hate it. About all I can say in its defense is that it is shiny. Shiiiiiiiiny.

Why am I the one working on it? I, apparently, am the de facto “computer person” in the household, which is a glorified way of saying that I know how to point and click. My parents are a little technologically-challenged, which is a nice way of saying that they began their journey into the world of computers with AOL. Thankfully, they’ve moved past that dark and dismal stage, but there’s still work to be done.

There were a few settings I had to turn off. Like the annoying little prompt that pops up every time I tell the computer to do something and asks for permission to do what I’ve just told it to do. That had to go. I also sneaked in one night and turned off half the sound settings. I doubt my parents have even noticed.

I had to convince them that moving a program from one computer to the other is not a matter of putting the program files on a CD-R and pasting them into a new computer. I agree with them that it should be that simple, but since it’s Microsoft I know it really isn’t, and they’ve either lost track of the original installation files, or it just hadn’t occurred to them.

I’ve been helping them transfer files from the old computer to the new. It hasn’t been pretty. We have the cable, and after a few false starts we finally found one program that mostly works, except for when it freezes up and shuts down. (The first time it didn’t exactly freeze; it vanished completely. No error message, just *poof* gone.)

I finally narrowed it down to one folder that the program refused to transfer no matter which computer I was working from. It was just a folder filled with image files of flowers and birds and similar pictures, but apparently Laplink PCSync hates springtime because it would not transfer it, period. That’s what CD-R’s are for, I guess.

And then I had to figure out where the files went, which wasn’t easy because Vista has moved everything around. They’ve done away with My Computer. In fact, they seem to have done away with putting “My” in front of everything. So now it’s just “Documents” and “Pictures” and such. I actually kind of prefer this, except that it makes things much harder to find at first. And while the “Turn Off Computer” menu is still under the Start menu, it is now hidden behind this tiny button with a tinier arrow on it. I have to come out and find it for my stepfather every time he wants to shut it off.

Oh, and then there’s this:

I have dubbed this the Fisher-Price desktop. Apparently the normal icons are just too hard for my parents to see, even on a screen the size of a small planet, so the icons have been resized to resemble small continents. The scale might not be entirely obvious from the picture, but I swear to you that you could hold up a 50¢ piece and it would be the same size. This is not an exaggeration in the slightest.

They’ve already had to do one forced restart, which involved unplugging the computer entirely because it would not shut down any other way. And while I am not a computer tech in any way, I do know that if your computer is offering to boot up in Safe Mode it is usually a bad sign.

So, Vista? The jury’s still out, but the more I use my parents’ computer, the more I appreciate my XP laptop.

It is awfully shiny, though.