I spent a long time tonight composing a post about Gustavo Dudamel’s appearance with the New York Philharmonic on Saturday night. Recklessly, however, once again I wrote it in the Typepad window of the browser rather than a text editor. It’s more convenient, especially in designing the post and searching for links.
At least it used to be, before I moved over to this new computer running Vista. Near the end of my writing — concerned from past experience that I was risking a complete loss — I copied my entire text, then went to paste it into a text document before starting a CPU-intensive Google hunt for an accompanying JPEG.
Two things happened at once. Explorer crashed, which no longer surprises me. But when I went to paste my saved text into WordPad nothing was there, which did surprise me.
(You don’t need to tell me that this is all my own fault, that I should have been typing in WordPad to begin with. I know, I know. I’ve been warned.)
What drives me to the point of madness is that Windows XP provided a platform stable enough that, with certain Typepad improvements in place, typing blog posts directly into the browser was no longer a problem.
But in Vista, Explorer has suddenly become the most problematic application on my machine. Which is ridiculous, y’know, since both products are made by the same company.
Making matters worse, my attempted precaution tonight was a response to having lost an even longer post last night about the Killswitch Engage/Lamb of God double bill at the Hammerstein Ballroom — where, again, I tried to copy-protect my text at exactly the same time that the browser decided to take a powder.
Okay. Fine. I give up. Every blog post from this point onward will originate in WordPad, not Typepad. I’ll make myself get used to it.
Naturally, it’s now officially too late to return my HP notebook to Best Buy and apply the credit (at a presumed loss) toward a Mac. That’s okay: This machine performs all the other functions I need, and it’s good to finally have Microsoft Word at home.
But can anyone point me toward helpful tips to make Explorer SUCK LESS in Vista? I’m having a hard time believing the incompatibility of Microsoft’s new platform and basic browser: it’s no exaggeration to state that I’m experiencing at least one Explorer crash every day — and usually more.
Night After Night 
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