Top Ten Reasons for Switching to Vista

Since I needed a new computer, I left my old laptop in Nigeria and had a new one waiting for me when I got to the US in early December. I intended to use Windows XP on it, but as it would cost more to order that way (i.e., more than getting it with Vista installed), I was going to use my personally-licensed XP Professional on the new one. Some complications prevented me from making that switch so I have been using the pre-installed Vista. I'd like to share what I see as the top ten reasons I can see why you, too, should upgrade to this new operating system.

1. You're having a quiet vacation and need something to do.
2. You're getting bored of the stability of Windows XP or your Mac, and want to try something more challenging. You like an interesting OS that keeps you guessing what will happen next, or you miss the fun of lockups and reboots you used to have with older versions of Windows.
3. Your current computer is running too fast, not giving you enough time to make and drink your coffee.
4. When you try to run a program, you'd like your system to ask you if you really want to run the program.
5. You'd like to have Google desktop, but don't want the bother of installing that free program. Plus, the Vista version has a picture puzzle you can play with.
6. You need an excuse to pay to upgrade to the latest version of your programs (otherwise, some won't run on Vista).
7. All your friends are will laugh at you if you stick with XP (actually, they're jealous).
8. You've got to have transparent menus and windows (though for this, I think, you'll need more than Vista Home Basic ... so be ready to pay a little more).
9. You need a way to use all those dozens of gigabytes of memory you have installed on your new machine.
10. You want to show Microsoft your support and appreciation.

Seriously, I'm quite convinced that Vista is a superior operating system, at least for businesses. Hopefully in a year or two the bugs will be worked out and it will be ready for me to try again. Meanwhile, when I get back to Nigeria, I'll be dusting off my XP Professional CD-ROM and starting another re-install.

(BTW, don't tell me to try Linux. I've got that installed also, in the Ubuntu flavor, but I still have too much invested in software and experience to abandon Windows.)

Juice Podcast Receiver Problem Solved

Friends, don't bother reading this unless this is why you have come the blog. I'm only posting this here because it's the solution to a software problem and the answer doesn't seem to be found by Google, not easily at least.

Problem: Juice podcast receiver (a great freeware program) running on Windows platform suddenly stops working. It crashes while loading and gives a message "OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory - see c:\program files\juice\juice.exe.log" or something similar. If you check the log, you'll see something like:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 153, in makedirs
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Great help, isn't it? The short answer AFAIK is 1 of 2 things:

• The drive letter has changed for the drive where the Juice program is installed, or


• The download directory, where the podcasts are to be stored, is not available. In my case, this was because it's on a network share that was unavailable at one point, and had to be accessed by Windows Explorer (or a "net use" command) before it was made available again.

For more information, see this post in the Juice support forum.