Windows Vista Woes or helping my Grandson with homework

Considering my background, it's not at all hard to understand how I've become the tech support helpdesk for family, friends and the neighborhood as a whole. I've done my best to accept my lot in life with grace and courage. This time, my Grandson, Steven, was trying to complete a homework assignment, to create a presentation on Gettysburg and the Civil War. He had completed nearly a half of his assignment when it was time to go home. So, he copied his PowerPoint 2007 deck to a thumb drive and brought it over to our home so he could finish it up after a family dinner.

He appeared to be getting more and more frustrated with something and my daughter, Lori, suggested that I go over and see if I could help.  He couldn't get OpenOffice to open the PowerPoint deck. As I'm able to do that magic trick with the version I have on my Windows, Linux and Mac systems, I was pretty sure that he merely needed to download a recent update.

<start ominous sound background music>

As I approached the Acer laptop we purchased for Steven as a birthday gift, I remembered that his machine came loaded with Windows Visita. Since I've done my best to avoid that operating system, I sat down at the machine with some trepidation.

Although it was a bit difficult, I was able to find all of the usual functions even though some of them had been renamed and could be found in different places. I guess the folks at Microsoft thought that folks using their systems would enjoy a treasure hunt while working with the system.

The next thing I noticed was how poorly the machine performed doing simple tasks. Steven's laptop has a similar processor, memory and storage configuration to my infamous Dell laptop that runs Windows XP, I expected to see similar performance. It was like trying to get something done in slow motion.

I was finally able to get the Web browser pointed at the openoffice.org website and tried to find and then download the required update. Every time I tried to do something a string of system messages popped up asking me if I really wanted to do what I just told the machine to do. Even though I clicked through the messages, I was never able to get anything to download.

So, I did what anyone else would do including, sending curses to the folks who designed the user interface and security protection for Windows Vista and then spoke with my daughter about reloading Steven's system with Linux. Then I did something that most could not do - I took the thumb drive over to one of my office systems. I was easily able to open the slide deck, save it in an earlier PowerPoint format and make the presentation work with the software on Steven's system.

<Turn off ominous sounding music>

What do you suppose a typical parent would do when these issues came up? Most don't have a home office containing so much computer equipment and different types of software.

Have you run into this problem?