Vista fails the Grandpa test

This weekend I came face to face with one of the real reasons Vista sales have been flagging: My 18-year-old son and I could barely set up a new Vista machine for my 80-something father. If two techies struggle to get Vista working, Microsoft is in trouble.

My parents have been using a computer they bought back in the late 1990s. It runs Windows 98, AOL version 5.0, and some ancient version of Microsoft Works. The thing practically needs a hand crank to get it working. After a few hours of chugging along, it tends to crash. And my parents, for reasons impossible to figure out, can't open attachments in AOL Mail.

A new PC was clearly in order, and we assumed that XP probably wouldn't be available. So we planned to get a new Vista PC.

First step before buying the new PC: Make sure that my parents' printer and scanner worked with Vista. We went to HP's Web site looking for drivers. The printer had one for Vista. As for the scanner, here's the bad news we found:

We are sorry to inform you that there will be no Windows Vista support available for your HP product. Therefore your product will not work with Windows Vista.

So now, not only were my parents going to have to buy a new PC, but a new scanner as well.

Next step: Copy all my parents documents to a CD. My son burned a CD with all the files. We figured we were ready to go.

More than two and a half hours later, after driving to a Best Buy (no reasonably priced PCs in stock), and a Circuit City (reasonably priced PCs in stock, but it took us about 45 minutes of waiting while the clerk printed out rebates) we were back with a brand-new Vista PC --- and an all-in-one printer-scanner-copier, which we had to buy because the old scanner wouldn't work with Vista.

Next, we unplugged the old PC from the DSL modem, power strip, and so on. Then we plugged the new Vista PC into the DSL modem, turned on the PC, and the PC booted up fine, aside from the immense amount of crapware littering it. But there was no Internet connection. After 20 minutes of searching, we found the DSL installation CD the technician used to install the connection for my parents several years ago.

We ran the CD once. It crashed. Twice. Crashed again. Three times...yes, reader, it crashed yet again. The software clearly wasn't compatible with Vista.

Time to call AT&T tech support. After about 30 minutes on hold, we were told that the connection wasn't working because the technician had connected the DSL modem to the PC via a USB connection, and USB connections for the modem require a special driver. So we had to install a driver, because we didn't have an Ethernet cable.

Luckily, the USB driver was on the CD, and more amazingly still, it actually worked with Vista. Be thankful, I thought, for small miracles.

Time to transfer the files from the old PC to the new one. My son popped in the CD full of my parents' files. No go --- the old CD burning software on the Windows 98 machine burned CDs that Vista couldn't read.

After a bit of brainstorming, we figured that we could disconnect the Vista PC from the DSL modem, plug in the old PC, transfer files to GMail, then plug in the new Vista PC, and download them.

We dutifully did that...except that the version of IE on the old PC wouldn't work with Gmail. We tried Yahoo Mail, and amazingly it worked. So we managed to get the old files onto the new PC.

By now, more than five hours of our lives have been wasted going mano a mano with Vista, and fighting it to a draw. So we called it a night.

I won't go into all the details of the struggles over the next day of getting AOL contacts from the old machine into the new one -- suffice it to say the contacts in the version of AOL my parents used was client-based, and in the newer AOL software, contacts are server-based, so there were more struggles. And I won't detail all the time my son spent ridding the machine of crapware.

Finally, though, after many hours and two days of work, my parents had a working computer.

All in all, it was a pretty horrendous experience. If this is what it takes to set up a new Vista PC for the mass audience, I'd have to say it's no surprise that Vista has been a bust.