Kevin Bridges

My laptop downloaded microsofts patch for the animated cursor vulnerability in windows Vista this morning. It told me I needed to reboot the machine for the changes to take effect.

Rebooting the machine resulted in nothing but a black screen instead of a login screen while the hard drive started churning away. Waiting until the hard drive stopped working did not change the situation. Rebooting did not help. The only way I was able to get my computer operational again was to restore the microsoft operating system to a previous date. It took over two hours before I was able to see a login screen. When I finally got there, Microsoft notified that my operating system was being pirated and that I needed to enter a correct serial number. Entering my serial number told me that I needed to call an obnoxious voice controlled computer to validate my version of windows. After making me feel like a complete moron for having to talk to a machine "trained" in the latest psych techniques for customer service I was redirected to a live operator with a heavy accent that was almost impossible to communicate with. I had to insist several times that I'm not installing anything on multiple machines and that this laptop didn't even come with an installer cd for me to do such a thing. She finally gave me the "authorization code" to get this machine working again.

This wasted 3 hours of my morning that I should have been productively coding with. Now I'm scared of installing any type of update and am vulnerable to known Vista exploits.

Do not ever use windows vista.