It's probably a bit late to be talking about how Vista works but something that happened on Friday brought my attention to how finicky and a little awkward Windows Vista would be for an old or inexperienced person.
It was the last day of the week and the last day of exams, so our Latin teacher promised that we could watch a DVD. Every teacher in my school gets a laptop with XP installed, and most don't have a problem with it. However there are some who find it very, very hard to use - like our Latin teacher...
Seen as it was Latin he had decided that the DVD had to be something vaguely educational - so he chose the Doctor Who episode where they go to Pompeii. He got his laptop out, connected it up to the speakers and the projector with little help and then was baffled at what he faced.
He had put the DVD into the disc drive in the laptop. As anyone would, he clicked on the disc drive and unfortunately it didn't work and was not responding. So, seen as I was the geek of the class he called me up to help him out. I tried to reach for the mouse - but he insisted that he would do the clicking and I would tell him what to click. So without actually checking if the disc drive was a DVD drive or a CD drive I told him to click on Windows Media Player. Then I told him to click on "Now Playing" - he refused to do so as there was the "egg timer next to the cursor and you can't do anything if that happens". I was so annoyed...
So after wasting half of an hour and a quarter lesson, he sent us off to the computer technician (who, to be honest probably doesn't know as much about computers as me ). We walked back and after some debating with my Latin teacher the technician told him that the DVD would not play in a CD drive.
So instead of watching Doctor Who for the rest of the lesson we watched some story-telling series starring Michael Gambon.
The teacher had that much of a problem with XP and it isn't exactly a "hard-to-learn" OS. I dread to think how long we would have been there if he had been using Vista. I suspect we would have waited about 20 minutes for it start up, about 10 minutes for it to "recognise" that there was actually a CD in a DVD drive, then about another 30 minutes for Windows Media Player to start up and probably 40 minutes to start up Task Manager to end Media player when it doesn't respond.
Anyway, we still wouldn't have been able to watch Doctor Who.
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