The latest Windows Vista campaign carries an admission that not all has been rosy since it slopped onto our PCs 18 months ago. This is married with a list of '100 reasons you'll be speechless', presumably intended to convey amazement at Vista's myriad new features.

There is a certain amont of desparation here, not least because most of the reasons are so unimportant and inconsequential that it defies belief that anyone would read it.

So I thought I'd fill Microsoft in on another reason why Vista has made me speechless.

A friend asked me round last night to look at a problem with his new Windows Vista Dell Inspiron laptop - he got it 'free' with one of those Carphone Warehouse/AOL laptop deals. And he couldn't connect wirelessly to the internet. I thought the problem would be related to the router amd shouldn't take too long.

In fact, it took me hours to sort out and was nothing to do with the router.

More coffee, please

Windows Update and McAfee were managing to connect to the internet, but surfing the web was a no-no. So what was up? An hour of experimentation coupled involving the removal of annoying startup apps, updating the AV software (as some Vista advice reckoned that Windows Updates can make IE be treated as a firewall threat) and general poking around of internet settings revealed nothing. Numerous restarts and faffing later, I was failing badly.

And, just like my mobile phone nightmare yesterday, it left me wondering that there must be thousands of people experiencing the same kind of tear-your-hair-out usability issues.

Eventually, after disabling yet more startup items and even disabling the new verison of TCP/IP used for NetMeeting (IPv6) I reset. And the internet worked.Vista eh? Microsoft, you've got an awful lot to do...