I hate windows Vista

Well with Circuit City going out of business my mother tired of my kvetching about my old Pentium II 350 mhz IBM Thinkpad 600E with 286 mb of RAM, and it's 60 GB HDD. Sooooooo, mom got me what she calls a "Real" computer. An HP a6700f with AMD Quad core processor 2 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD all the bells and whistles. But the kicker is. Windows Vista Home Edition. And NOoooooooooooooo installation discs. Although it does offer you the chance to use the built in DVD Burner to burn a recovery disc which will restore the system to it's original state. Well ok. The back up program said it would take 3 DVD+R's to back up the system. Well the first one burned ok, the second one, a disc from the same package as the first, the drive could not identify. Ok, let me try another one from the SAME box. Eeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, nope. couldn't ID that one either. hmmmm finaly after 2 more discs it recognized the disc. It started burning the files ok everything going ok. Time to verify the files Eeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhh a full box of 10 discs it either couldn't ID the disc or it couldn't verify the files were written correctly. Spent over an hour on the Tech Support Chat with a very nice lady from HP's Tech support. She had me try this, and try that, and try something else. Nothing worked. Finally I had to redo the entire system with the recovery partition. And now I am downloading all the updates AGAIN, and downloading all the other programs I need. (Firefox, Spybot Search and Destroy, Registry Mechanic, AVG {I cannot STAND Norton internet security}, Audacity, Switch and others) So I'll be spending the next 2 to 3 days RE-CONFIGURING the whole system AGAIN. HP however has said they will be sending me a new DVD Burner under the warranty. This is not an HP problem, it is a problem with the supplier of the DVD drive who I will not mention, and HP has already told me I will be getting a drive from a different manufacturer. I'll keep you posted on that. HP has also said that I will be getting a full set of install discs with the new drive. If HP sticks to what they've told me, I'll be recommending HP to my friends. Up to now I've always had Frankenstein computers. 2 of my systems are Compaqs that my brother the IT guy has overclocked for me and configured to run with bits and pieces they really shouldn't be working with. such as DVD reader drives that require a Pentium III that are running on a Pentium II, a DVD Burner that requires a Pentium IV running on a Pentium III. Plus various programs that require XP or Vista that are running on Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98 Second Edition, plus a lowly Pentium I still running Windows 95 that should have a CD Burner on it at all that does. Some of this stuff I set up, the Pentium I's and II's, the Pentium III's my brother setup, and now I have a Quad Core AMD HP to play with. If only it didn't have Vista and had XP I could really work around all this stuff. But live and learn. I guess it's time to learn how to work with Vista.

Mark