Finally got my wife a new laptop. She spends all day frustrated at work because her new computer isn’t compatible with her work software. It’s Vista apparently; the software is not compatible with Vista.

“Everybody at the office agrees, it’s kind of a wierd operating system”. “Nobody likes it”. “It’s not compatible”. “I talked to the two tech guys and they both said it was Vista”.

Excellent.

The software is actually browser based. The geniuses who wrote the software forgot to set the content-type header for the pdf file they generate and they don’t call it a .pdf, so IE doesn’t know what to do with it and throws up a non-helpful prompt.

Translation for the less technical folks: this has nothing to do with Vista.

If you add up all the other stupidity Vista gets blamed for by both software developers and incompetent tech support people, you get a picture of why it has a bad name. It’s the new thing and it’s easy enough to blame, so why not.

That damned Vista.