Sunday night, 8 pm. I've gotta couple of free hours to fart around. Girlfriend's sick and doped up on anti-histamines on the couch, watching her shows (well only sort of watching as she's drifting in and outta la-la land)

So I figure I'm gonna do something I haven't done in a looooong time. I'm gonna nerd it up and play some computer games!

Back in January I got a new PC. Nothing fancy, an off the shelf deal that's got better processor, memory, RAM, video card than my old rig. The old PC works fine, but is from 2003 and struggles with newer stuff coming out so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Oh yeah.... there's one other difference. The new computer has Vista. The old one has XP. The idiot that I am (and I AM a very big idiot) my thinking was "Hey, anything that works good on XP is gonna work good on Vista right? Shouldn't be a problem!"

Ho boy, what a moron I was!!

So I'm in the mood for some quick fun and install Star Wars:Battlefront 2. If you haven't played it, it's mostly a first person shooter that you can jump into and start blowing away bad guys from your favorite scenes in star wars (re-enact the ice battle of hoth, blah blah blah)

So I fire it up and jump into a battle.... and right away the program shuts down and I'm staring at my desktop. No error message or intervening screen- just plain jane desktop.

Huh? Okay, no biggie. Gotta be something simple that I missed. I screw around with some of the settings on graphics and sound, play around with the compatibility settings.... still the same thing. I hop onto a forum for the game, scroll past the angst of pimply teenagers getting fragged by their friends and flame-threads about whether Luke Skywalker would win in a fight against Captain Picard. You know, general nerd stuff. I find the technical difficulties area of the forums and whammo, hit about a dozen threads about how the game doesn't work to well on VISTA.

I find a couple of solutions that worked for other players that required minimal changes (keep it simple stupid, start out with the quick and easy stuff, no reason to tear apart your machine when there's an easy fix) but none of the quick fixes are working. Finally there's a couple threads where the fix is to download some drivers and replace existing. Even then, it doesn't work for all the players and it's a matter of trial and error, download this, if doesn't work then try downloading this, tweak that so on and so on.

Keep in mind it's sunday night and I just wanna blow away some bad guys in short order. I'm not gonna spend a half hour or an hour of my time messing around with my PC for a game that may or may not work and could require me to reverse all the changes later anyways.

Ok, one game (that worked perfectly fine on XP on a much inferior machine) doesn't work on my new rig. No big deal, I just wanna play SOMETHING. So flipping through my disks I find Civilization 4 -and- Civ 4 beyond the sword (expansion pack from Civ 4 with some pretty cool mods of the game)

What the heck, I've always loved Civilization. I pop it in and load it up. Install finishes and I go to play, right away it doesn't work properly either. Let's keep in mind folks, this is Civilization, a game whose first incarnation was written in basic and will run on just about anything. Not only did Civ 4 run fine on my old inferior XP machine, earlier I loaded it up on an even -older- laptop when I was on the road and it purred along just fine.

Lather, rinse repeat. On the vendors website they've got a patch I can download, but -may- still require a bit of tinkering from the forum posts of other dejected players.

By this point, I've had enough. I'm not gonna waste any more time trying to change this and patch that just so I can try to play some of my beloved classic games with the dwindling time I have left in the evening. I'll fart around with getting things working when it's a rainy day and I have the time or the inclination.

So.... out comes the cabling from my brand new VISTA machine and in it goes to my old XP machine sitting right next to it. In less than 5 minutes I'm running around blowing away bad guys on Hoth, which is all I wanted from the get-go.

From talking to friends and colleagues, I haven't run into one person who thinks they're better off with Vista. I have one friend who has trouble downloading photos from his camera (he's not an idiot either, and the camera manufacturer released a statement that it's stuff has troubles with VISTA)

From an end-user perspective I see no advantage whatsoever of running on VISTA. Very shortly I will be switching to a Linux based system, or maybe even join the dark side (as my brother did years ago) and become a MAC user!!!!

Congratulations Microsuck, you guys continue to take simple requirements and turn them into tedious, laborious technical challenges.

Final verdict?