The Price of Progress(?)

Last Sunday I had reason to suspect that I had a spyware in my system.
My personal laptop, that is. Since I bought this used laptop, couple of
months back, I have not done a proper housecleaning, I was still running
the same OS that the previous owner had, it was XP that looked like
Vista, some kind of bastardization of XP, I suspected. Plus the
numerous, uselss utilities (paradox?), an unmanageable Start menu and
other junk. So I decided to do a clean sweep of it all and since Windows
Vista DVD was all I had at hand, I decided to install that. (When you
move to a foriegn land, you have to make some tough choices in selecting
what to take and my XP Pro CD was one that didn't make the cut! [No pun
intended!])

So, I installed it, all nice and fancy like most MicroSoft products.
And, like most Microsoft products, utterly useless! Too many prompts,
incompatibilities with programs I needed. And any time I tried the
shortcuts and my fast style of doing things, I kept stumbling over
Vista's so-called "features". But I was telling myself, "Sunil, don't be
like a grumpy old man too set in your ways, embrace change for a
change!" [No pun intended!] . Well, I did keep trying to embrace the
bloody change despite the Blue screens of Death, cryptic, recurrent
error messages and various other nuisances.

Ever since I installed Vista I had been having problem with my internet,
the speed was unbearably slow. NTL being what it is, I had been doing
the shut-down-modem-restart-in-30-seconds-reboot-computer exercises
quite frequently. But yesterday, before trying to upload the website I
called up NTL to properly take care of it. The NTL rep told me their
connection was absolutely fine!! Imagine that!! Since the OS was new,
firewalled, with Windows Defender reporting no spyware, I suspected
something else. Using that extremely slow connection I checked on the
net and found that Vista does not peacefully co-exist with Wifi. I
connected it directly. That helped, a little, but it helped. Then I read
more and found that it doesn't like Mozilla Firefox, only IE. Bloody
Hell!

Considering that I practically live on the Net, this is unacceptable!

I mentioned something about this to Vinayak in one of the emails about
the website and he came back saying he is still using Win2K Pro and
doesn't even remember in which year he installed it!

Now, I am looking to go back to Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000 Pro.