One day in the life of Vista land

I have refrained myself from joining the increasingly populous Vista bashing crowd, but looks I can't. It's getting personal. Recently my three months new hard disk in my brand new Dell Inspiron desktop failed to boot even under repair mode after several consecutive crashes, the 2nd time in 4 months. The first disk failure happened only less than 2 months into the life of this new computer. After spending hours with Dell tech support on the phone, they finally agreed to replace my "ceased to be" hard disk. Four months later another disk failure occurred, this time it crashed on the singular occasion in a year when I use Windows for, running TurboTax to do the tax. I'm so mad that I want to choke Steve Ballmer. It's time to chat with Dell tech support again (this time I was talking to Philip, the 2nd Philip I spoke to in two days, guess Dell's tech support this week all named Philip):

Me: This is a brand new hard disk. What could be the problem?

Philip: Do you have the automatic system updates turned on?

Me: Yes. Isn't this recommended by Dell?

Philip: I think your system may be screwed by recent automatic updates. I suggest you turn it off.

Me: Wow! Amazing! So...Dell is actually aware that automatic updates by Microsoft may damage it's customers' systems and yet doesn't have the courtesy alerting it's customers?

Philip: We only make hardware, not software. It is Microsoft, not Dell, who updated your system.

Me: [speechless]

...then suddenly I'm enlightened, I am not so mad anymore, I no longer want to strangle Mr Ballmer, I'm amused, I've an epiphany, I am going to blog it.

[courtesy to phoenixredux for using his image collections]