As written by my friend Lisa Marie Mary

Feeling the Difference Between Windows XP and Windows ME

I have been down on a long and treacherous journey over the last year with my computer. You see, back in November, my hard drive crashed. I was devastated. I lost all of my data. It was truly a bummer. My precious machine had bit the dust.

That lovely machine had been running Windows XP, and what we did to get me back up and running until we could buy a new hard drive – was to commandeer my sons’ machine. The depressing part of that was their machine is running Windows ME.

Not only is Windows ME outdated, but, also, I have since heard that it was by far the worst OS ever put out by Windows. I would seriously not doubt that. In the months that I was using their machine, I could not count the number of times that I was told, “Windows ME is not compatible with that.” “Windows ME is not compatible with that.” Ugh! It’s like an evil echo in my brain! It was terrible.

There were just so many programs with which ME would not run – all kinds of different programs, too! It wasn’t just one type of thing, it was many things – across the board. It was definitely an aggravating few months, although I was happy to at least be online.

We have since had a new hard drive in my computer, and it is, of course, running Windows XP. It’s like I have the world at my fingertips again! Glory be!

Going from XP to Vista – oh my!

My father recently gifted me with a new laptop computer. He had told me long before I actually got it that it was running Windows Vista. As a longtime Windows XP user, I was nervous about the change. And I’d heard so many tales of woe about the new operating system, that I was actually kind of dreading the arrival of my new machine. Now, that is just silly. I’m being gifted a new, top-of-the-line laptop, and I am dreading its arrival?

Well, I have to say that my fears were totally unnecessary. I love the look of Vista. And I have so far had very few problems with it. The only thing that I can see, so far, to be problematic, is that some of the plugins for Firefox are incompatible. And there are substitutes, so that is not really an issue.

I’ve heard people with much more experience than I, computer-wise, talk about technical issues that I just cannot wrap my brain around. I suppose if one of those issues begins to affect me, I will then have to learn about how to deal with it, or like the Firefox plugins, work around it. Right now, though, I am enjoying learning this new interface.

I really like the see-through preview windows of everything. Often, I don’t really need to fully open a window up – just check something there. And for those instances, the preview screens come in very handy.

One thing in Vista that I am way behind on learning is the new Microsoft Word. It is amazing! There are so many new things to learn in it, though. I am plodding along slowly, and learning as I go.

All in all, I’m enjoying Windows Vista, and having a great time discovering all of its new features.