The movement to convince Microsoft to continue XP past this June, when it was supposed to fade away as Vista became supreme, just became a lot more real to me. I bought a new Gateway with Vista with my tax rebate money. I was never that thrilled with XP, but after six days on Vista I am running back.

I turned to this story from InfoWorld in January, which outlines how businesses are begging Microsoft to keep XP. They've even started a petition to send to Microsoft. I quickly signed it.

Over the last few days we've seen the Blue Screen of Death five times. Vista, it turns out, doesn't like Dreamweaver. Vista also rejects my new Canon All-in-One out of hand. It's not just that this program or printer doesn't work. Vista collapses at the mere thought of them on the same computer. Needless to say, Canon's excellent photo-editing software is out of the question. Remarkably, so is have a picture in an email signature -- something XP handled with no problem.The computer was about $800 from Circuit City. Now $120 of my tax rebate will be spent on Circuit City's restocking fee when I return the computer. But that's better than spending $250 for a new printer and somewhere between $200 and $1100 for a newer version of Dreamweaver.

Now I am looking for a store that is catering to XP holdouts. Just weeks ago J&R Music World had XP machines. I see they are now gone. Dell seems to be a bastion of XP support. It has several models. It's tempting. But just as no one wants to be a Microsoft experiment subject for Vista, no one wants to buy the last XP machine, either.