What *bugs* did it have and how much memory did the laptop have?
Plenty of memory — it’s in a different city from where I am right now, so I can’t check, but I’m not doing anything that hogs memory — no video games, much less online gaming, just browing the Internet and occasionally using Word or Excel for small personal tasks. And I can’t always tell to what extent bugs are from the operating system or the software, but I’m not using anything but the Microsoft software that came with the machine — not even using a printer with this machine. In Explorer, it’s very inconsistent about whether it will allow me to copy a URL from the address bar with right mouse-click/Copy vs. manually highlighting the URL and then pulling down the “Edit” menu/selecting “Copy” — and often left-clicking in the address bar won’t highlight the URL, but often it does. Another frequent Explorer bug is when I open a new window by right-clicking on a link in an existing window, and the new window comes up with the menu bar missing — but if I close Explorer and re-open it, I can open the same link the same way from the same window, and the new window comes up normally — but the problem often recurs a short time later. Also endless problems with the wireless Internet connection, even though I had no problems with my old Windows 2000 laptop in the same location and the other people in the house, with XP machines, aren’t having these problems.
Frankly I can’t tell if there are any bugs affecting Word, because the interface is such an inscrutable pile of chaos that I really can’t use Word at all, beyond simple typing. I split my time between two cities, and if I need to do anything in Word beyond simple typing, it’s just easier to wait a couple of days until I’m in my other home with my other computer, than to try to untangle this insane interface. And there’s just the plain annoying crap, like if you want to “Shut Down”, you have to figure out that the little multicolored circle where “Start” used to be is the first thing you have to click, and then you’re presented with a long list of things that aren’t “Shut Down”, and you’re supposed to figure out that you’ll find “Shut Down” hidden behind a teensy little non-descript unlabelled arrow. Yeah, I can find it NOW, but it’s just totally irrational to hide a function that people use constantly, behind meaningless symbols. And of course, the machine takes forever to boot up.
Nope, I’ll never buy another machine with Vista, and I’ll try to hang on to XP as long as possible. If Vista was Microsoft’s idea of an “improvement” over XP, I shudder to think what Windows 7 will be like. Linux may be next for me, when XP finally becomes obsolete.