Recently I had a situation where I had to install and use Vista. I’ve had a little experience with Vista and knew I didn’t want to put it on my primary work computer. My wife wasn’t quick to donate her box either (believe me I tried to sell her on how Vista was the latest greatest!). She did come up with a great idea though. We have a Mac we use for testing at work and she suggested putting Vista on there. I thought it would be a lot of work but read about Boot Camp and decided to give it a shot.

First its extremely easy for an advanced computer user to install Vista on a Mac. Just download Boot Camp and print out the instructions and follow them. What’s more important is how well this fits into Apples business. I’m not a normal Mac user but I can certainly agree that their hardware rocks. Boot Camp is an awesome way for Apple to allow PC users to take advantage of their hardware. Apple doesn’t lose anything by allowing a user to install another OS on their hardware and they have sales to gain. They even get the opportunity to expose you to OSX albeit a brief one if you never boot it again.

Apples sales model makes one wonder why a company like Dell isn’t trying to get ahead by marketing similar hardware. People certainly are willing to pay a premium for nifty hardware packages like the Mac mini. And to be honest, it seems amazing we are still buying towers when all that same hardware can be placed in a much more tidy and pretty package.

I’ve noticed at work that Vista and Firefox play horribly together. On several installs of Vista with Firefox 2, Firefox loads some websites very slowly. You can open IE and load the same website in a snap.

Naturally any normal user just wouldn’t deal with that problem and switch right over to IE. Microsoft gets more users back on IE quite simply like this. Fortunately for the geekier users out there, a quick search for “Firefox Slow Vista” reveals the remedy. Checkout Rob Garret’s site which is the top match in Google for how to fix the problem.

Apparently something called auto-tuning is what causes the problem. Doesn’t that sound a little backwards? Auto-tuning sounds like something that should be helping not hurting Firefox. I have no clue what auto-tuning is and don’t really care what it does as long as Firefox works. I do however wonder if this was a purposeful “problem”.

Democrats are big wimps. The new phrase from the white house is irresponsible. Bush and his team are calling Congress irresponsible for letting our troops in Iraq continue unfunded. I have news for Bush and the Democrats. It’s irresponsible to leave our troops in Iraq unfunded. If there’s no money left for them, bring them home! Why aren’t the Democrats jumping on this?

Bush probably knows he’s gonna have to bring them out of Iraq against this congress. He’s gonna end up making the Democrats look bad throughout the process. The Democrats just need to stand up and fight back the rhetoric of the White House. What better backing do the democrats need to act than a majority in the house and Senate given to them by the people of the United States?