While we're adrift in the traditional pre-Macworld Expo news lull, we'd like to share a personal experience with you all. We recently visited the home of a young nephew to drop off his holiday gift-- an edutainment software title starring Dr. Seuss, whom he loves. Upon tearing off the wrapping paper, he voiced his desire to try the game out right away. His father dutifully went about the task of installing the software. Unfortunately, our nephew's computer is a Wintel box, and while it's usually a pretty well-behaved system, this particular installation was a rocky one, at best.

First, the installer program noticed the absence of QuickTime on the system, and proceeded to load it-- version 2. Then, strangely enough, it proceeded to install QuickTime 3 on top of the older version. Then the application software itself was loaded, the installer quit, and we were ready to go. Or so we thought. The program started up, music was playing, the Cat in the Hat was singing, and suddenly-- nothing. The music cut out, the video stopped mid-frame, and we were forced to kill the application from the Task Manager. What could be the problem? Too low on disk space? The system did seem to be swapping an awful lot. He uninstalled a few older programs they no longer use. Still no go. Strange, the Control Panels showed two versions of QuickTime loaded-- but he couldn't uninstall the earlier version because the files were in use by the system. Even a restart didn't fix that-- though a Windows dialog assured us it would.

Uninstalling QuickTime 3 appeared to work-- but the control panel remained. And regardless, the game still froze at the exact same place. Disable virtual memory? Same freeze. Disable graphics acceleration? Same freeze. In frustration (enhanced by his son's impatience at having been teased with only the beginning of a song over and over again) he tried re-running the software installer. For some reason, this time it began to load DirectX, which it hadn't before. It also updated the sound card's driver. There appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel, and yet, trying to run the game still yielded the same twenty seconds of video and music followed by an icy crash.

By this time, an hour had passed, and it was time for the family to leave for a party. The Windows system still was no closer to running our gift. Our nephew then burst into a frustrated temper tantrum and had to be sent to his room, screaming. All in all, not the happy holiday scene for which we had hoped. And we should probably point out that the boy's father is not your Average Schmoe-- he's a systems guy for an accounting firm, so he knows his way around Windows. Seeing him struggle with getting a children's edutainment title to run was, well, a little harrowing-- and a great reminder of why we use the computers we do. Maybe by next year we'll have won the lottery and we can buy the kid a Mac...