electric relaxation

A quick summary of all the reasons why I can’t use Windows Vista. Any single one of these should have been a showstopper, but I was too stubborn for my own good.

• No SSL VPN Client support. Cisco has a beta VPN client that trashes Vista’s networking stack when suspending/resuming on a laptop. Juniper’s SSL VPN client just doesn’t work; both IE7 and Vista are blockers there.
• Horrible flickering on my ThinkPad T42 with ATI Radeon Mobility 9600. It’s hard to say who’s to blame for this one, but I’m guessing it’s the ThinkPad’s fault for not reporting EDID information correctly, and ATI’s fault for writing retarded drivers that crap all over themselves given the slightest opportunity. I managed a half-ass work around for this issue using PowerStrip, but that required me to run it manually on each boot, because it doesn’t play nice with Windows Defender, and reset the display settings after each suspend/resume or undock cycle.
• Outlook Web Access crashes IE7. Yet another depressingly retarded confluence of suck. Microsoft has a fix for this, but it has to be applied server-side, and requires temporarily stopping the Exchange server; I didn’t even bother running that past our IT department.
• No Dial-Up Networking with my BlackBerry. Perhaps this is BlackBerry’s fault, but I’m guessing it’s Vista’s problem. This was the last straw; it’s such a useful thing to be able to surf the Internet from anywhere, and nothing Vista gives me was good enough to overcome this huge deficit.