My brother’s out visiting for Thanksgiving, and his Vista-powered (or was it ready?) notebook is having an incredibly difficult time connecting to our wireless network (for whatever reason). I was, of course, quick to place the blame on Vista — and not just because I’m being bigoted; this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone complaining about Wifi problems under Microsoft’s “best” OS.

Anyways, I began searching Google for problems specifically related to his PC/chipset, but, in the process, stumbled across a completely scientific method of proving which operating system — Vista or XP — was better.

First, I searched for “Vista wireless problems”: 15,400,00 results.

Then I searched for “XP wireless problems”: 13,700,00 results.

Not quite as overwhelming a victory as I’d hoped for, but it’s pretty clear who the top contender is.

(As a purely academic exercise, I then typed in “Linux wireless problems”. A scant 46,200,000 results. Maybe this method isn’t really as accurate as I was hoping for. Or, more likely, people are posting lots of comments about how Linux fixed their wireless problems. Yeah.)

If you’re like me, you loathe installing software. Then again, maybe there aren’t many people like me. In fact, maybe my personality is a statistically improbable occurance. So improbable that it’s more than likely that I don’t exist.

In other news, here’s a list of extremely useful software that you don’t have to install — they all have single executable downloads that require no additional files. This alone makes these applications great for stashing on a thumb drive or downloading for a single-time emergency use on your friend’s machine.

• uTorrent - great for those rare moments when you need to download a quick, uh, VMWare image
• SciTE - a lightweight and competent editor that includes syntax definitions for, *gasp*, PHP (and other lovely languages)
• The pervasive PuTTY - quite possibly the best Windows SSH client ever
• WinSCP - when you get sick of the Windows command line (which you no doubt will, because it’s not really good at all), try joining the 21st century and using a GUI

I just discovered why Windows has the largest slice of the market share: it’s so darn helpful.

A few minutes ago, a little popup window appeared near my tray with a nice little message about updates that were ready. I clicked, scanned the list of updates and deselected “Internet Explorer 7.0 for Microsoft Windows”, as any self-respecting computer user should.

Another dialog appeared: “Updates that are not selected will not be installed.”

No duh… That’s why I deselected it. Thank you, Windows!

I found a pretty good deal on a laptop during CompUSA’s three day clearance (or some such), so I went and picked it up to replace Mindy’s aging Averatec (which has been a trusty old thing, but is, as I mentioned, getting some gray hairs). Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), it came with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.

Before buying it, I spent some time researching the downgrade clauses in the various Microsoft EULA for Windows Vista. According to everything I could find (and I’d post links if I wasn’t so lazy), the OEM EULAs do NOT include any sort of rights to previous versions of Windows, so if you were planning on that, don’t.

First impressions of Vista, however, seem to mirror what everyone’s told me: slow and annoying. The laptop came with 512MB of RAM, about half people said I’d want, so that’s part of it. But all of the confirmation popups have nothing to do with hardware.

All in all, though, after switching back to the “legacy” interface and removing the desktop background, I think it’ll be manageable. Although I am considering installing Ubuntu…