I’ll keep it short, because I know I have nothing truly new to add to the ongoing “Vista sucks” conversation. But there is something about experiencing pain first-hand instead of just reading about it.

My grandmother, as luck would have it, actually did get a new Vista machine around the time of my last post. So this past weekend, during a visit home on the way back from Philadelphia, she asked me to help her “make it work”.

Even though my grandmother has done nothing but play Solitaire and glance at Google Finance since she unpacked the thing, the operating system had managed to render itself un-bootable. We had to nuke the entire disk and start over.

Just to configure her profile — which means adjusting the icon size and spacing, increasing the default application font size, and dropping a bunch of shortcuts onto the desktop — I had to “Confirm” security dialogs over 20 times. Even after a full Windows Update (and the obligatory reboot), it continued to pop up security confirmations at her while she played Hearts.

She’s learning, though. She told me this morning that she figured out how to “make it work”: just confirm every security warning you ever see. Problem solved.