The Gomez Blog

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t like Microsoft.  This is just another reason why.  I got two new computers for our secretaries at church and needed to configure them.  They came with Vista Home Basic, which is basically worthless for our purposes.  So I was going to install XP on them since we own plenty of XP licenses.  Only it doesn’t let you just install XP on a Vista computer, you get errors.  So I thought I’d just wipe the hard drive completely and install XP.  Didn’t work.  So I figured I’d cut my losses and just upgrade to Vista Business since we owned about 20 licenses.  Here’s where it gets fun.  On the Vista computer I opened Internet Explorer and went to the MS eOpen site to download a copy of Vista Business to burn to a DVD.  Only IE doesn’t support browser based downloading at the MS site.  Did you get that?  Microsoft’s browser doesn’t support downloading their software at their own site.  So I try to use the Download Manager as recommended which requires an ActiveX plugin.  After several pop-ups and toolbars, I get to the Download Manager and click download.  Error.  The MS download manager in IE won’t download MS software.

So I thought maybe IE8 would work better (I was using IE7).  I went to download IE8 Beta 2 and when I clicked run, I was told that IE8 didn’t work with Vista.  Did you get that?  MS’s new browser doesn’t run under their new operating system.  Wow.  

So, I turned to my old trusty pal, Firefox (I’m actually writing this under Google Chrome because I thought I’d try it out).  I downloaded FF3 went to the MS site and started the Download Manager.  It worked.  I downloaded my copy of Vista Business and went about my upgrade.

To clarify, in order to get a copy of the software I was entitled to from Microsoft, I had to go to a different company’s browser in order to use Microsoft’s website.

A while back, I wrote sort of a position paper on why schools, churches, etc. should move away from Microsoft.  I’ll rework some of that and post it here soon.