Sicko

Michael Moore's new film, Sicko is his best work to date.

It is an incredible film and every American should see it.

Now I want to move to France, Canada or the UK! (You'll understand after you see the film.)

Vista reboots without warning

At least once a month on my PC, Vista will reboot without warning!

No dialog box, no warning box, just all of a sudden everything begins to shut down and then Vista reboots. A search on Google and Microsoft's site has turned up nothing that discusses or addresses this behavior.

I could attribute this behavior to Windows Update which as a rule updates on Tuesdays, but today is Saturday, it is 8 in the morning and once again Vista did an auto reboot.

Even stranger is that I had been working on the PC for at least 30 minutes.

Well once again this just serves as an example of the lack of thoughtful design and professional programming practices that should have been in Vista, especially after 7 years of development.

BlogHer 2007

COST:
$205.93 for two days of networking with other women bloggers, etc.

LOCATION:
End of the Navy Pier, Chicago.

I may be attending, difficult to predict at this point.

Window Vista and Bluetooth

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

As of this writing, there are NO (as in ZERO) Windows Vista certified Bluetooth products on the market.

I recently spent the day with a new USB Bluetooth adapter vainly attempting to get it to work with Vista. Hours later after much research it appears that Vista isn't very well behaved with Bluetooth.

I plugged the same USB Bluetooth adapter into an XP PC. Wham! Worked flawlessly!

So what else is broken in this shoddy OS? Did Microsoft outsource the entire Windows Vista project to a bunch of losers from India or what?

Windows Vista - Wireless Issues

My daughter's Vista PC has a new Linksys adapter in it.

Recently her PC stopped connecting to the Internet!

It shows her as connected, but in reality (as opposed to the fantasy world of Windows Vista) she isn't connected.

We removed and reinstalled the drivers.
Ran a diagnostic on the network card.
Dropped the firewall and anti-virus on the off chance they impeded connectivity.

All the other PCs in the household connect without problem including the other PC that runs Vista.

The daughter wants me to remove Vista and install XP as she needs to be on the Internet.

Seems like a reasonable request to me as it becomes more and more obvious that Vista is the worst OS ever released by Microsoft.

Hotel Internet issues

Man, it seems like every hotel in the US seems to be too cheap to upgrade their routers beyond the "b" standard to supporting "g" or even the "n" specification.

I recently stayed at a Microtel in Tampa which as usual had "b" and amazingly had a T1 line! This is a very small hotel with even fewer guests using the Internet. I gave the hotel manager who was quite interested a mini-speech on the advantage of upgrading to at least "g" and preferably "n". Come on, at least for small hotels, routers are cheap!

The nice thing at the Microtel was that you had wireless in your room, which unfortunately doesn't seem to work well in other hotels.

Currently I am in Chicago and while my hotel offers free wireless internet in the lobby, it is $10 a night in the room and to top it off it's wired in the room, not wireless. No biggie, as I always carry a network wire just for those odd occasions, but I can see if you weren't traveling alone where there could be an issue, as there is only the single Internet port in the room. Maybe people traveling as a couple might be wise to pack along a router just in case.

I sure wish more hotels would upgrade to at least "g" if not "n"!

Windows Vista - Microphone

I foolishly attempted to try to use my microphone under Vista for the first time.

My microphone worked fine in the past with Windows XP.

No such luck with Vista. Checking the Creative site to see if there were new drivers for my SoundBlaster Live! sound card brought me the news that Creative would not be writing any Vista drivers for this older card.

So, I did a bit of research and bought a Creative Xtremegamer sound card.

The sound is much improved, but attempting to use the microphone (which took a lot of research and fooling around with to enable) is still a no go. At least I can see some movement on the audio bar while attempting to "train" the microphone, but it still isn't usable for gaming, Windows Speech Recognition, navigation or any other function.

Looks like my new research project is to find a decent microphone with some kind of a volume boost.

As usual there is NO HELP on the Microsoft site. Vista still sucks and it is not a product that Microsoft should be proud of.