Well, I’ve always had computer troubles, my knowledge and operational skill is probably below average in that I cant do much other than obvious stuff, and if the computer is starting to slow down and defragmenting doesnt work, I’m pretty much lost. The interface for maintaining alot of the functions and programs is too dispersed, and on top of that it seems like some electronics just dont like me. In the case of my former computer, the power source died TWICE in a connsiderably short period of time, along with the slow down issues I couldnt fix.

The first time it died my brother got a new video card and had to get a new power source to sustain the new addition. His old power source was an exact match for my dead one, so we switched it into mine. Then just the other day while trying to get the internet connection to work, I shut it down and it wouldnt turn back on, but the power source troubleshooter lights worked and even the ethernet LED lit up when connected to the cable, same as last time. I would think the wall outlet got hit by a power surge but even there I have it hooked up to a power source/surge protector to prevent that.

We were looking for a replaement and the only ones we could locate were $70-100.00 USD, and it was more cost effective to buy a new one. So far it’s a pretty good replacement, a slimline model from HP with the dual processors, about a gigabyte of memory, 250 GB hard drive, built in wireless adapter card, windows home Vista premium (Im told this is much better than the basic version which has been described to me as bare bones.) and it’s far smaller than my old computer, I could fit rouhly three of these thing in it’s space, for about $580.00 USD before rebates without a moniter.

My complaints thus far is that Vista is still kind of being debugged via user reports. I havent seen anything I can call a glitch or otherwise, but its as though theyve made it more complicated and more dispersed. I spent a good hour just trying to find the moniter settings and once that was located Vista wouldnt let me enable a cloned view to be streamed to my TV screen to use it as a second moniter. I get the feeling it’s playing dumb because when the tv is plugged in during start up the Nvidea card shows data across the two screens, each getting its own info, ut it suddenly dissapears once Vista loads up. This computer was built with Vista in mind so I imagine the s video port on the video card can be used for a second display, though I have heard of some anti pirateing technolodgy Microsoft added that messes tup rca ports or other easily pirated technolodgies and scrambles or blocks the use of certain ports, so the rumors go. If this is 100% true why even have a bloody S Video port in the first place?

So far I havent used Vista enough to give it fair review but its just as user unfriendly to me as XP is (and I still think XP stands for the toungue sticking out at you rather than some technical abreviation) and it seems more like a graphicaly updated version of XP with a few more menu additions that disperse things in a more agrivateing manner, on top of that if Microsoft word is on here to act as a spellchecker for these articles, I cant find it…