Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Ugh.

Had some writerly/computerly turmoil over this weekend.  Started doing the old “submit stories to people who might buy them” thing, and encountered a problem.  Back when Vista was all I could get on a new computer, I opted to run Ubuntu instead.  Felt adventurous and I’d always wanted to learn a little about Linux.  Ubuntu had Open Office on it, and I’d been using that primarily anyway on my last laptop before it died.  Open Office worked fine for RTF docs at the time, which all my stories were in.

Flash forward a couple years.  As I start submitting these stories, I notice the format is going crazy.  Randomly switching from single to double space. Headers that were obviously on LSD…

So I did some research.  Turns out Open Office no longer really supported RTF.  I know, right? So I converted all my stories (grudgingly) to DOC. I checked they were all formatted correctly, and then saved.  I reopened the files: Still good.  Then I submitted them to markets electronically.

And that, kiddies, is where the magic gremlins live and thrive.  Because apparently, based on the emails I sent out, the formats have all regained some measure of their former dicked-uppedness.  Even though they were now in DOC.  A weekend of submissions going out and they all look like a typesetter sneezed for as much as I can tell on my end.

Kept me up all night, I’m not kidding.

Decided to give Vista a[nother] shot.   Desperate times and all…. It’s sat on a partition of the laptop unused for most of the past two years, except occasional excursions into molasses-time to do iTunes.  (The biggest criticism of Ubuntu I had before all this was the lack of itunes and webcam/Skype support.  Now, I’ll be fair and say Ubuntu itself is fast and easy to figure out for basic purposes–hence its popularity in netbooks, but if they can’t find a single word processor that can be taught Standard Manuscript Format, I’m Audi.)  After some consulting with a buddy, turns out what I needed to make Vista work–now that it’s had time to get out of “customer sponsored beta-testing”–was simply a RAM upgrade.

Got R Done and whammy-zammy, Batman, the Vista side is running fast!  It’s like having a whole new computer!

And then of course, in my abrupt abandonment of Ubuntu and Open Office’s unwriter-friendly issue, I discovered Windows 7 was out for testing.  OF COURSE I WAS SKEPTICAL.  But three IT guys I trust, plus the little dude at Best Buy all said they’d been running it just fine.  And I do have a problem with not being able to resist cutting edge techie stuff that’s free.  (I’ll never learn….)

Giving Win7 the old college try on the partition formerly occupied by Linux Ubuntu.  It is incredibly fast.  Thus far, not even one crash.  It has a bit more of the sense of fun that only rarely peeked its head out in earlier editions.  The themes and backgrounds have personality.  One of the pictures that came up on the desktop slideshow looked like the Space Needle and its reflection in the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle.  I’m fairly sure that’s what it is, anyway.

Win7 is very fast, and the most intuitive Windows yet.  It seems like they’ve learned something from Ubuntu and Mac (as usual) and  netbooks AND THE FLUSTERCLUCK THAT WAS VISTA’S EARLY RELEASE. There’s a neat feature where if you drag the window all the way to the left or right, it automatically takes up that half of the screen.  Makes it great for comparing documents, websites, etc. when you have the two windows on opposite sides.  Also good for file transfer.  If you drag the window to the top of the screen, it maximizes.  And the fun part is if you grab the top of a window and shake it, all the other windows fall away.  Shake again, and they’re back.

There’s a bit of coolth in the Show Desktop function too.  Roll over the button and you can peek behind all the open windows.  One huge improvement is the reduction of all those constant PITA reminders and “just making sure you wanted to do that” messages.  They wore me out.  There’s still some in Win7, but they’re like shy wallflowers now.  You hardly notice them.

And fast!  It is much faster than Vista, and at least as fast as Ubuntu was on my machine for booting, shut down and file transfers.  Yes, I did compare times with the extra RAM in.  I’m no more Anti-Ubuntu than I am Anti-Windows.  I only care what works and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg for the privelege.  Oh, and using Wordpress website admin over the web was very draggy on Ubuntu.  Especially in regard to keyboard responsiveness.  Not so with Win7.  As I wrote this blog entry, I was transferring 16G of iPod music and movies over to this part of the partition.  Not a bit of lag!

So anyway, probably more Win7 geekery coming as I play with it.  It’s on a 50GB partition, with Vista still safely ensconced in the remaining 100GB.

I’ll keep the weeping and gnashing of teeth over my poor crap-formatted story submissions to a minimum.