Trying to help my dad out with his computer. I've come to the conclusion that Vista is a pig. It's slow as treacle, unless you turn off all the 3D nonsense which frankly doesn't do much anyway. It's not very stable. Norton anti-virus refused to identify itself to uninstall; when I finally worked it out, the uninstall took for ever. Eventually I had to reboot; it turned out to be because it was waiting for input from me from a dialog underneath the "uninstalling" progress bar. And I could not get it sharing files despite my best attempts. The only nice thing — it knew the name of my router and opened up a browser to http://192.168.1.0 automatically.

Picasa is also a pig. The UI is slow, the scrolling uncontrollable. I want to add captions and place into an export folder but, unaccountablly, this takes about 20 clicks. Urrgh.

Just got a new Plantronics Discovery 510 — this is a bluetooth earpiece that I thought would be good for travelling; no wires to get broken and tangled up in my bag. This is the third device I recieved from Plantronics. The first two, Discovery 340 I think, were both broken. I think it was a systemic fault in the manufacture as they both failed in exactly the same way, during pairing. The 510 is a nicer device (sold at three times the price so that's not surprising). The main advantage, however, is that it actually works which is a relief. The sound quality is not that great though. I guess most people are using this over a mobile where you wouldn't notice, while the drop from normal skype quality is clear. Still, it will be useful, so long as it doesn't break.

Meanwhile, my new Virgin Broadband sufffered it's first outage. Around 18 hours, no connection, no DHCP, no DNS. Pathetic. Their authomated phone support service said "Some people may be having issues, and our engineers are working on it. Turn your modem off and on may fix it". Gods, talk about lack of specifics.

I've just given my laptop a good clean out, in particular removing services I don't use. Killing Zone Alarm and VMWare has together had a massive impact. Previously, the boot took about one and a half minutes, and then after login there was another two minutes before I could actually use the system. The boot is about the same time, but I can use the system in 5 seconds now. Makes a big difference at a conference, where you hibernate and wake a lot.

I'm all in favour of being nice to foreigners, but I think that it's all gone too far myself. We are now being so nice to people from other countries that we are making life harder for decent, hard-working British people.

For the last few days, every time I go to http://www.google.com or http://www.myspace.com, the stupid interface talks to me in French. Just because I am in France. Well, I think that this is just wrong. These websites should be in English everywhere. If the French want to be spoken to in their own language, then they should click a button or set a preference or something.

Anyone know how to stop these and other sites stop being clever and doing the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing?