XP never forced me to do that

Well, I've installed Vista now, and the hell of having to reinstall XP and then its successor is fading from memory. But I've had a new rubbish experience now, and I find it rather worrying.

For some reason my laptop froze yesterday. I had been installing a new driver or some such thing (in retrospect I should have taken notes at the time) and something went wrong, and it seized up. OK, that's bad enough, but then I pressed the power button and the thing went into sleep mode. And wouldn't come out.

Dead. An expensive, new, dead laptop. Panicking, I did the only thing I could - something I've never had to do with XP, in no circumstances. I pulled the battery out, clipped it back in, turned the thing on and all was right again.

The first thing I did next, of course, was to change the settings so that "off" means "off" not "sleep", so hopefully I should never have to do that again. But I'm not thrilled. I can handle having to soft-reset my Vario II every now and again, because I'm used to the Windows Mobile experience, but I shouldn't have to wrench the battery out of a notebook to turn it off. Good job I didn't have any unsaved data.

Other than that, Vista's very shiny and nice. But... hmm.