The Cat Crashed Vista

As if Windows Vista didn't have enough stability issues, my cat Baby had to go and break it to the point of inoperability yesterday.

Side note: I swear I'm about to convert to a Mac. The only reason I haven't replaced Vista with XP on my laptop is because I don't want to spend a day and a half reinstalling apps and restoring data and reconfiguring Outlook, which will switch all of my 350+ imported contacts to "Last Name, First Name" format despite my pre-configuring it for "First Name, Last Name" order. That pisses me off every time I restore a PST file, and I'm just not gonna do it again because the manual process of converting all my contacts takes too long and I've already lost too many hours of my life doing it in the past. I'll be lying on my deathbead, cursing Microsoft to give me back those hours!

Anyway, yesterday I had my laptop up on my desk as usual, running side-by-side with my XP desktop that I use for work. The laptop is primarily for school and personal business. It's hard to keep my cat Baby off the laptop—she's drawn to its warmth. Unfortunately, I came back to my desk and found her lying down on the keyboard and touchpad.

On the screen was a bunch of calendar icons showing the date "5," completely covering up the gadget side bar. I realized that Baby had clicked a series of commands that opened up new gadget calendars—a lot of them! First, I removed the cat from the keyboard. Then I planned to click each calendar to close it. No biggie. That should take care of it. Problem was, after the first one closed, the whole operating system froze. Frozen mouse, frozen keyboard. We ain't got no stinkin' Windows!

My only option was to wait. Clearly a CTRL-ALT-DEL intercept was impossible. When the OS didn't un-freeze, I had to cold boot the machine. The desktop finally showed up several minutes later (as Vista is the slowest loading OS in the universe). Again, the "5" icons covered the gadget sidebar. Again, I clicked one to close it, and the OS froze.

Next time I cold-booted it, I reloaded Vista in Safe Mode so that the gadget bar wouldn't load, which it did not. However, in Safe Mode, the stupid gadget control in Control Panel is unavailable. I had to boot again (Normal mode) and try to load Control Panel as quickly as possible so I could go into it and reconfigure the gadgets before the gadget bar loaded.

The problem with that is that whenever I click Control Panel in Vista, I get the little spinning blue circle of death while Control Panel s-l-o-w-l-y loads. Finally I got Control Panel up and was able to disable the option to load the gadgets on Windows startup. That was the extent of what I could do. The gadget settings wouldn't let me remove any gadgets! I even tried resetting the gadget bar to the way it orginally loads in Windows. No go. It still loaded up infinite calendar gadgets.

This left me with no choice but to simply stop using gadgets altogether. This is what we call an "infinite loop" in software. I can't stop the gadget bar from loading infinite calendars unless I start up the gadget bar to attempt to remove the calendars, but starting up the gadget bar causes it to load an infinite number of calendars, freezing up the machine. Catch-22. No more gadgets for this user!

Sigh. I think I'll go shopping on www.mac.com....