Dell Dimension Trials and Tribulations

With major system upgrades comes major problems, like how moving up to XP in 2002 left me without a scanner or a cheap, shitty digital camera. So far, here have been the issues I've had to deal with: (WARNING: If you're normal enough a human to not know stuff about computers, this is all going to be a bunch of nonsense)

• Had to download new drivers for my printer. No big deal at all, except for the fact that HP's download servers are slow enough to take an hour to send me a file that would take less than twenty seconds to get from anywhere else.
  
• Onboard graphics have no DVI connection, meaning I have to hook up the monitor with a VGA cord. Only available VGA cord is horrible and unshielded, meaning everything is all ghosted, like cable TV that's being stolen from a neighbor or something. I could have sworn I had a better cord somewhere, but apparently not.
• Old graphics card, (ATI Radeon 9250, for the record) despite not being as good chipset-wise as the onboard GeForce 6, has more video RAM and a DVI connection, so it would be something cool to use until I find a real VGA cord. The problem? Despite being fully able to run DirectX 9, it's still somehow totally incompatible with Windows Vista. Basically, it would work, but the Windows Aero theme wouldn't be available. And Windows Aero is basically the main difference between Vista and XP. D'oh.
• Hey, the new computer uses SATA connection type stuff to hook up disk drives, instead of IDE, which works a lot better. The problem? My old (as in maybe six months old) DVD-RW drive is IDE, meaning it's useless to me now. Not too big a problem, since this computer came with one, but I lose LightScribe functionality that the other drive has. (That's the thing where you can flip the disk over to the label side and basically burn a picture on there) So, uhh, anyone who wants a DVD-RW drive that can do LightScribe and about 15 or so LightScribe CDR disks can make me and offer or something.
• PS2 connections are old as hell and outmoded by USB 2.0, which is the new hotness, at least as long as FireWire never really catches on. So this computer got rid of the standard PS2 mouse and keyboard connections in the back, making USB the only option. No big deal, seeing as how my mouse was USB and a new USB keyboard came with this thing. Oh, except they didn't think to add more USB slots when they got rid of the other stuff, meaning I effectively go from six available slots to four. And between a mouse, a keyboard, a video game controller, a printer, an external hard drive, the external DVD burner I use to capture videos with, and assorted other cameras, MP3 players, and bullshit like that, I have something like ten things that need a USB slot to connect to the computer, and of those things, six are pretty much never disconnected. So I had to steal back the old USB hub thingy I bought to put in my old, ancient computer that only had USB 1.0 and then gave to my brother, whose computer had similar problems. So that problem's solved, giving me a total of ten slots, not including the bizarre, useless one that's housed inside the computer. But now, I only have one remaining PCI slot (old school PCI, not PCI Express) for internal-type expansion.
• I've only ever used Windows Media Player for audio and video files, and I've never had any complaints with it. But with the new and improved Windows Media Player 11, (exclusive to Vista, oooooh) videos slow down for the first few seconds, and MP3s start cutting out toward the end of the song. Also, if you've got a playlist and want to skip to the next track, it takes like ten seconds to do so, when it happened instantly before. So ITunes is looking really good right now, and I usualy hate Apple stuff. (Seriously, fuck Quicktime.)

Yeah, Technology's Gay.