Tell that to the morons that design the things. Every time the electricity flickers, I have to reset 5 or so clocks at my parents' house, otherwise they'd be flashing 12:00 forever.

On the other hand, if you ever have to make house calls to check on a PC, appliances flashing 12:00 DO help in diagnosing the cause.

They're starting to build hard drives into TV's, so you can download shows from the internet. For situations like this, it is quite understandable.

Though the remote comment is about right. And don't forget the fact that some TV's still store things (like channel list) in volatile memory (with no battery backup!) that has to be maintained by constant current. It's stupid in this day and age, but they do.

On a related note, there's got to be a way to back up date/time on appliances, or power a clock with a battery, so they don't f***ing flash 12:00 in my parents' house.

Windows 7 still has problems. Several of them in fact. Having used it, I have been frustrated by multiple issues with the installer, requiring multiple rollbacks, and just in general ticking me off. I hope this gets ironed out, because having to roll back way earlier, or hoping and praying that installing something doesn't mess up the installer... just isn't going to work for me in an OS I actually use on a regular basis.

It's a 19" Dell D1226H CRT. It's SUPPOSED to be able to handle 1600x1200 at 75Hz, but it doesn't handle it well. The screen darkens, and moves up and to the left, such that it's almost unusable.

It's pretty old, I've had the thing for years. I'm only still using it because it's a spare computer, and I gave the LCD I used with it to my mom for her computer.

With Vista I found UAC VERY annoying. Sometimes I'd get one warning from UAC, click OK, then get another one for the same program. This seems to have been ironed out in Windows 7. It's still there, but it's less annoying.

What WAS annoying is that the box I'm testing Windows 7 on has an old Dell CRT attached to it. Windows 7 got the screen refresh rate wrong (75 when it should have been 60) and screwed up the display from 3/4 into the install process till I was able to get into settings and change it. To be fair, Ubuntu on NVidia restricted drivers does the same damned thing.

Second annoyance was sleep mode. With my aging monitor (or maybe its the video card) coming back from sleep mode corrupts the display, and cannot be fixed short of a restart. In the default configuration, the computer goes into sleep mode after 30 minutes. Easily enough fixed, but still I didn't like it.

Another problem I found, was I found it hard to locate some things in the control panel. It's different than XP.

The last issue was a driver problem, that computer's onboard sound didn't even have a Vista driver. Fortunately I was able to get the XP driver to work.

I have yet to find any other real problems with it at this point. All in all MS seems to have learned from a lot of Vista's mistakes and made improvements. I'm not sure I'll buy a copy at this point, but I'm not ruling it out either.

am I going to read while stuck on the toilet? Maybe it's time to install a computer in there, and hope the cat doesn't knock the mouse into the water....

On a related note, I fortunately still have a few copies of a certain Scientology magazine squirreled away in case I run out of toilet paper...