It's been an upgradey few days for me. On Friday, my old work Dell (256 MB of RAM to run Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash at once, yummy!) finally found itself a new home as a bigger, newer model stopped by. My IT guy said it should take two hours to transfer all the files off my C drive (we have network storage for everything except personal/music files). He was back five and a half hours later. He was astonished that I had a massive 10 GB of music on my computer; I was rather surprised that it was only 10 GB. Perspective, I suppose.

My dad upgraded his laptop this week and I was next on the list for a replacement, so I got his one-year-old Inspiron. It is about 100 lb. lighter than my old HP, and has about 1000 times more power, so I'm hoping for Great Moments of Creative Productivity over the next while.

Surprise of surprises, it has Vista on it. He's finally decided to give the new OS a chance, and it appears he's taking me along for the ride. He told me that I can go back to XP if I want, but there's something so fun about having no idea how to turn off Autoplay or how to find your My Computer. It a rare moment when I know more about computers than my dad (I've been able to teach him a few tricks with iPods, and of course HTML, but he's been building the things since '82 and trains cable companies on how to improve broadband connectivity, or something, for a living), but I was able to figure a few things out before him.

Everything went well with the software installs, but when I got home and tried to connect to my remote storage, things took a dramatic step backward. Netgear doesn't support Vista. 160 GB, all my photos, music files and documents, are completely inaccessible to me. So I did some searching around and discovered (amongst the complaints that my particular device likes to overheat and sometimes erase all its files—how do I back up 160 GB without going insane?) that there's a new beta version of the software needed to connect the device to Vista.

And that's what I'm up to today. Cross your fingers for me that this beta won't cause me to lose everything, and that my printers and tablet are not as difficult to troubleshoot.

Update: Success! Now onto the printers!
Update 2: Anyone need a Samsung laser printer? Works great with XP!
Update 3: Scratch that. It was the print server that was causing the trouble. The printer works fine with a little third-party software and a direct connection to the computer.