So I’ve got a Vista machine on my desk these days. I’m going to try life Microsoft’s way and see how it works out. Outlook 2007 for e-mail and calendar, Excel, Word…Microsoft tools all around. The latest one I’m trying out is the Windows Complete Backup tool. This is a great idea – a foolproof full system backup. I have a DVD-R drive that is plenty fast so I thought, heck, let’s give it a shot. The upside: the process is supremely easy. The downside: I’ve now been feeding the system DVDs for 4 hours with no end in sight. I’ll report the final results whenever it is done!

I’ve continued to use the Opera browser/mail client combo. The e-mail app is sliding downhill in my estimation. It doesn’t always correctly report when messages have been marked as read/unread. The dynamic folder views don’t allow me to move messages around into folders – I wind up with duplicates. The last downside is actually a browser issue – the Luminis Portal here at IWU is not supported. There is no way we can support a product unless the Portal works. I’ll keep checking it out.