Thinking of Vista? Think again…
I had a meltdown about a week and a half ago when I replaced my laptop’s keyboard using Gateway’s “easy” instructions and damaged a ribbon cable on another part in the process. You guessed it, my backups weren’t up to date. (Shame, shame!) Well, I dropped it off to my trusted tech fellow and he called me later that day to inform me that he couldn’t get the part needed to fix my machine. OMG what is a girl to do? I have a PC but it’s ancient - 6 years old now and slower than molasses…and my other laptop. Wow, that one could reside in a museum. I think it’s from 1996 or ‘97. To my tech I asked, could he backup my files for me onto my external hard drive? Sure thing, Pam, he said…but that’ll be $80. I bit the bullet and got him to back it up.
That night I went out and purchased a brand new HP Pavillion desktop with all the bells and whistles - 4600+ AMD Athlon dual core processor, 320Gig hard drive, 2Gig RAM, Nvidia GeForce graphics card, and the piece de resistance….a 22″ widescreen LCD monitor (Is it hot in here or is it just me?) Man, I was completely geeked. That is, until I fired it up and proceeded to enter a new listing in an MLS system for a client and realized that Vista is NOT COMPATIBLE with Paragon, nor is it with FlexMLS. Okay, I resorted to my 2001 dinosaur PC as slow as it was, and figured life was okay. Then, I needed to prepare a CMA for another client, went into Top Producer 7i and guess what? Right you are…NOT COMPATIBLE!
So, just a word to the wise. Prior to upgrading to Vista or buying a new computer take heed - it may not work with your third party software.
Pam
February 20th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Thank you Pam for the info. I hate that you had have the “experience” of finding all of that out. Compatability is the name of the game now. We might want to have the latest and greatest but will it work with all of the other stuff we have. Thanks again. Hope all is well. Melissa
February 21st, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Pam,
You are a riot! I’m sorry you had such trouble with it and I haven’t gone into deep waters with Vista, however I was spinning in the gerbal ball with Office 2007. I couldn’t get 2007 to work right for 2 days and once I uninstalled their new desktop search that worked! Let me know when they get all those bugs worked out.
Congrats on the computer! You might want to check out Mozy for a back up too!
February 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
My husband and I have been “talking” (IMing actually, since he’s in Iraq) daily this past week about this very subject! I’m in the market for my 1st laptop - always have used his when I needed mobility and since he’s in Iraq, I’m dying being tied to the desktop. I have picked out the one I wanted but it is Vista enabled and I am not ready for that especially when I read that some of the MLS systems and a lot of other software I use for clients are not compatible as of yet. What he suggested was to buy a big enough HD and partition it like he did his and run Windows XP on one side. I’m not technical and really have no idea if this would work or not, but it’s an interesting idea that I plan to look into.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Pam,
My heart goes out to you! This reminds me of compatibility issues with IE7 and the MLS, Top Producer, etc.
I’m curious; do you think that it Is the platform updates that come out too quickly for the software makers to keep up? Or is it that the software makers are too slow to keep up with progress?
Enjoy your new computer! Hopefully they’ll catch up soon!
Sharon