A few weeks ago (or was it just last week? Time flies when you’re living life, I guess), Mark Pilgrim posted an extended de facto rant about installing Windows XP and making it usable for his purposes. At the time, I thought it was a bit overdone - but after spending the last two days trying to get a laptop set up with various applications that I need to do my job, I’m a bit more sympathetic to his experience.
In particular, I spent probably six hours trying to get Visual Studio.NET 2003 to install on my machine today - and it still doesn’t work correctly. Originally, it would crash as soon as it was run for the first time after installation. I finally got around that problem by running it in safe mode on the computer, but the first issue was then replaced by a more insidious problem: now, it crashes the machine whenever I try to create a project. Given that VS.NET revolves around working with projects, this is something of a problem and a major frustration.
Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow.