Don't judge a laptop by its OS

Ack, it's a geeky post.

Sherwin and I bought new laptops last week. His is a Compaq-Presario V3234 and mine's a V3235. The specs are great, core duo/core 2 duo, 1GB memory and 120 GB HD with Windows Vista. The color is black and exterior is very sleek. What made me decide to go for it is the Windows Vista UI. At first glance, Windows Vista is just amazing. The new user interface is very cool and the graphics are mind blowing so we told Ernesto (the salesman) right then and there that we’d get the machine.



After tinkering with Sherwin's laptop a bit, we realized that a lot of applications are not yet working with Vista. It wasn't a big deal at the time because we bought a licensed xp pro anyway. The problem started when xp could not detect the hardisk so it can't resume with the setup. I had to research and research to find a solution and saw that several users are in fact returning their notebooks not just because they hate vista, but installing a clean xp will require you to download several device drivers. I spent two days trying to find a way to make the hardisk work. As I write this, the only thing that's not working are the audio (which is very important), wireless lan and bluetooth. I just don't have the patience to search for the drivers anymore.

Lesson learned, always research about the product before you buy them. In our case, we had no idea that Windows Vista still sucks. I know it will get better soon but we'll probably stay with XP for at least a year. Don't get me wrong; it's still a pretty cool machine. I just wasn't expecting that installing XP, which I can do with my eyes closed, could drain me this much.