To Vista or Not to Vista

I like the looks of Vista, the colors, the lack of blue and green, the side bar thing I would probably never use. All of that crap is kind of cool. Of course I downloaded the official Vista checker from Microsoft to see if my computer could handle the new OS. I knew it could, I am still running a 2.4GHZ machine with 2.5GB of ram and all of that happy shit so I wasn’t worried about that.

The problem I did have is that it flat out told me that my HP scanner would not work in Vista. I went to HP’s website to see if they had a driver coming out in the future for my scanner. When I went to their website I found this wonderful nugget of information:

We are sorry to inform you that there will be no Windows Vista support available for your HP product. Therefore your product will not work with Windows Vista.

The majority of HP products not supported in Windows Vista are beyond seven years old.

If you are using the Windows Vista operating system on your computer, please consider upgrading to a newer HP product that is supported on Windows Vista.

Well this is a bunch of bullshit here. Not only will Vista not support my scanner, but neither will the company that makes them. If I scanned all of the time and used the scanner everyday then I wouldn’t have any problems dropping some money on a new (most likely non-HP) model; but the problem is that I don’t use it every day and it would be a waste of money to spend on something I use roughly seven times a year. But Dave, why don’t you just go without a scanner since you never use it. Why, because I have one now. A perfectly good one now and I don’t think I should have to spend a lot of money on a brand new one (don’t ask why I’m not willing to spend on a scanner when I had considered spending over 100 on Vista).

Another problem I have with this system is that it’s new. Sure it lingered around being tested over and over under the name Longhorn but come on now, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. I only need to think back some time ago when I had rushed out to upgrade my shitty Windows 98 to the newfound glories of Windows ME. Ah, those were the days let me tell you. ME was supposed to be what XP is, reliable. I don’t think my computer had ever crashed as many times as when I put ME on it. I couldn’t believe that shit because up until I upgraded my computer had never had a Kernel error.

So, my dilemma continues… I want the newest of new but when I looked at what I did versus what Vista will do for me, I opted out. In fact, the coolest thing I liked about Vista was the black taskbar. Come on now, if you’ve been using XP for any length of time you know you’re sick of the color scheme there. Sure, you can change that kindergarten blue and green over to a silver scheme or an olive-green scheme or god forbid, the “classic” Windows style. Well, I’ve been searching the internet for a way to get my black bar in XP. I didn’t even care if it looked just like it did now and was just black, I wanted another color choice. I looked all over and saw a few secondary programs I could buy but like we covered before… I’m a little cheap. I did find some nice articles about switching out my Uxtheme.dll file to allow non-Microsoft themes to be used. The price for that? Free. And I got my black bar too.