Shut up.  All of you.

Yeah, so I went to the Vista and Office 2007 launch event in DC, and while there I had the chance to talk to an old friend from a previous job who's now working at Microsoft.  Of course I took the opportunity to plaster him with grief about my Vista issues on my Vista Capable D620.

He casually mentioned the seven updates released for Vista on launch day.

So, I soldiered back to the front lines and reinstalled Vista, plus updates, and my VPN still wouldn't work properly.  But this morning, however:

In Windows Vista, you cannot access any resources on a remote VPN server after you switch a network connection from one network adapter to another network adapter and then dial a VPN connection

So, obviously there will be more updates coming.  I had worked around my VPN issues by removing the default gateway on the VPN connection, then setting static routes for our Richmond network; I've remvoed all that, and I'll see if it works if I switch between networks.  So far, so good.

...

Then, my cell phone started beeping.

Back when Sprint finally released the RAZR (a year after every other major carrier, but I digress) I hopped all over it.  Yeah, it's a phone everyone has and carriers are giving away for free, but it beat the crap out of my LG Sprint phone - their first with Bluetooth.  What was even better was that I can charge it over USB and transfer MP3s to it as ringtones.

Of course, I couldn't install the drivers for my RAZR in Vista without some trickery: I had to enable the local Administrator account and install it as local admin.

Nice of Microsoft to disable that gaping security hole, and I won't be complaining about UAC, either.  But, the hardware and software manufacturers still have a lot to do, and this driver installer is just a perfect example.

(For those who want to know, if your computer is a domain computer and you have administrative rights on the machine, you can just go into the Computer Management MMC, go to Local Users, then set a password for the Administrator account and uncheck the Disabled checkbox.  Then switch users and install the drivers.  When you're done, I'd disable the account again - there are reasons its disabled - and repeat if you ever need to try that trick to get difficult software to install.)

Sometimes, I hate being a beta tester of released software...