Oh, darn. And my pesky laptop failed to update itself, after multiple attempts and many days stalled at 99%.

Luckily, I didn't really want it, but thought it might be useful to have a copy of the Edge browser, for completeness (I make a lot of webpages, and it's useful to see which browsers can't understand standard HTML… the problem child is usually Apple, these days).

My problem with Microsoft boils down to this: I hold grudges.

Sometime around the turn of the century I did a Business IT course at night school. It was pretty easy, I've been programming since I was a child, and I basically learned only two things during the course: ASP is easy, and what the heck a database was. Obviously I'd done things with data, but I didn't know the word, and I certainly didn't have anything like SQL.

On the last day, as we were leaving, Mark the tutor asked me if I'd looked at the SDK for DirectX7. I said I hadn't, he explained that it was a. useful, b. easy, and c. free, and I went home to try it out.

It took some trial and error (because the docs for these things are written by and for people who already know how it all works), but eventually I was making games, like I used to do in AMOS on the Amiga. They weren't anything especially awesome, but they were fun, and I was slowly progressing to larger and more complex things.

And then Vista was released. And more significantly, Isegrim installed it.

Now, I don't have a lot of friends. I'm not a social person. When I make a game, I'm usually making it for me and Isegrim, and with Vista firmly infesting his PC, he could no longer run my games.

Vista could run DirectX7 just fine. No problem there. It could run programs written in Visual Basic 6 just fine, too. But the library that linked the two, Dx7vb6.dll (or whatever it was called) wasn't supported, for no good reason, and short of learning everything again from scratch, there was no way forward. DirectX8 had almost nothing in common with the DirectDraw I was using, and the newer versions of Visual Basic had almost nothing in common with the VB6 I was coding in.

The idea of learning it all again was soul-destroying, so basically, that was me done with games. Fuck you, Microsoft. Every new version you bring out is a slow, broken, bloated parody of the original, and you expect praise and money for it. Fuck you.

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