yelvington.com

I already hate Windows Vista, and I'm not even running it.

My mother, who lives in Missouri, has decided to finally plug into the Internet. She bought a laptop, which came with Microsoft's latest operating system, and ordered a DSL line from her local phone company. A relative managed to get the DSL modem and wireless hub configured yesterday after a bit of telephone consultation.

So today she's trying to browse the Internet, and she's having troubles.

Microsoft has made such a buggered-up mess of the IE7 user interface, which looks like something a teenager designed as a Winamp skin, that I can't even help her over the phone. And regardless of what Microsoft claims, Internet Explorer is a bugwad just asking to be infected by a virus.

Solution? Install Firefox.

She managed to find Google, run a search for Firefox, and click on all the right link to make the download happen. But Vista won't let her install it, popping up an alert that it's not digitally signed by Microsoft.

Signed by Microsoft?

As has been noted, that's not security. It's business terrorism -- frightening the user in order to protect Microsoft's business interests. This sort of nonsense doesn't happen on OSX and Linux, which simply require the user to confirm the installation with a password.

I swear, next time I get up there I'm going to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu Linux, Picasa, Abiword, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Update May 2008: I am closing comments on this thread because it's primarily attracting spammers. If anyone cares, I long ago migrated both my mother and my wife's mother (and my kids as well) to Ubuntu Linux, so I no longer have to worry about viruses and upgrades. It works, it's rock-solid stable, it's easy to use, it delivers much better performance than Vista, and they're all very happy with the universe of applications available to them.