Bmoag--
Respectfully, I think you can have a much better experience than you're
having right this moment.
We all know that the response of hardware/peripheral companies and video
card makers could have been better, (and I think that Microsoft could have
leaned on them harder but the haven't.) I can give you a parallel analogy.
There are 300 OEM named partners. Microsoft all but steps on their neck to
make damn sure they don't ship an OS CD in XP or an OS DVD in Vista (Dell
has rebelled as a hopeful exception according to Dell's blog. As to high
end printers, monitor profiling devices etc. I think you could get some
drivers up and running that you haven't.
I don't know what specific devices you refer to becauase you didn't specify
them.
One simple trick I've found if you can call it a trick or a slight
workaround for drivers is to run the wizard for the driver update from
Device Manager or hardware wizard so that you browse to the location of the
downloaded driver files. With some devices there are special workarounds
that you can search for on the web.
You ask how it's going to change between now and February. My guess is that
a lot more drivers are going to show up and hopefully for those enjoying
Vista X64 and 64 bit pcs.
I loves it when MVPs trade Swag for Blind Defense of MSFT
Wake up America and any country who has people dying in Iraq for Bush's
fiasco.
You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war don't
it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006 New
York Times
IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon
talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished
his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan
in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality.
It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the
truth is.
The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2
percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief
who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a
war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's "unity
government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation "in
the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him
"the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on" in
his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
impervious to facts.
In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the right
guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki
would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi
and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed
this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
Sadr's existence.
In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell wrote
of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language
of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush,
the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
meaning altogether.
When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one
that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for
his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two
words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into
what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were
fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or
not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
English as we once knew it.
It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public
alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
"abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).
In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such
regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and
post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word
"war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
Olsen twins.
I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is
the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth and
fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
further his partisan political ends.
But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the
real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to
gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever
the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan
did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress.
Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to get
them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground
is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made
by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he
is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American
voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House unless
the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the
only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
of changing course would be accomplished.
Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around
Thanksgiving.
Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
