The guy who happens to own the company that employs me asked me to take a look at his laptop.  It was not downloading mail and Outlook kept crashing.  He sent mail to Microsoft, who told him he was running an old version of Office and he needed to update.   Thanks, Microsoft, you’ve been a huge *$&#ing help.

I did a repair on Office to no avail; it kept crashing.  I did an XP repair, which also failed; more crashing.   Windows: it’s not an operating system, it’s a virus.

Owner says the laptop is getting pretty old and it’s time to order a new one anyway, which I set about doing.  Here’s where it gets even more fun…  the last laptop ordered was from the consumer Inspiron line and had this humongous display (17″ or so).  It’s more of a desktop replacement than a laptop.  Since we’re commercial, we can’t even see  the Inspiron line on our Dell page.  Dell rep says to go to consumer page and put together a system, which she’ll price out for us.  Done.

This process took forever and I kept getting questions from Dell.  I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what was going to happen and Dell never disappoints: I got an email back stating the laptop was not available with XP, period, and I’d have to go to the Commercial line (which I abandoned because I couldn’t find one with a large enough display).

We don’t use Vista.  I won’t use Vista.  I won’t order Vista for anyone because most of my people would require retraining and we just don’t have the staff (or desire) to undertake this.  Unfortunately if Owner wants that display, he’s going to get stuck with it.

Just to make things more interesting,a coworker asked my boss for a recommendation for a home pc.  He obliged and the result got brought to me to set it up with the corporate VPN (lucky me).  Upon opening the box, the first thing I noticed was the Vista label.

I am about #&@ing sick of Vista and I have barely touched it.

Coworker was agitated at Boss for the cockup, I was agitated at both of them, and the entire written output from Boss on the topic was, and I quote, “Dang.”

Coworker calls Dell about replacing the box with one that has XP.  They have to return the entire  system, including printer and monitor, and purchase a new one.  I got a voicemail asking which version of XP.  For the uninitiated, XP Home is worthless if you need to connect to a network or domain (and won’t work with our VPN).  Dell sells us Vista Business but installs XP under the MS downgrade option (so MS can say it’s selling Vista without actually selling it).

Day three: Coworker told them she wants XP Pro and then they tell her they can only sell Vista.  Then why did they ask her which XP she wanted?   If I were a consumer, I wouldn’t want to deal with this kind of idiocy.

So now Coworker is stuck with a Vista machine and no idea how to run it.  I am stuck installing the VPN and hoping it works with this version of Vista.

I am reminded of some ancient words of wisdom….

No good deed ever goes unpunished.