As I mentioned last Wednesday, my oldest daughter bought a new HP laptop running Vista Business the previous Thursday. We visited her that Sunday, and she was just starting to get the computer set up. Like many people with home wireless routers, she had all her computers configured to use the network strictly to get to the Internet. "You mean I have a network?" When I enabled file sharing and created an app As I mentioned last Wednesday, my oldest daughter bought a new HP laptop running Vista Business the previous Thursday. We visited her that Sunday, and she was just starting to get the computer set up.Like many people with home wireless routers, she had all her computers configured to use the network strictly to get to the Internet. “You mean I have a network?” When I enabled file sharing and created an appropriate password-protected share on her old laptop, she was able to start copying her documents and music to the new laptop.She had already removed most of the “craplets” that HP had preloaded on the machine, and was beginning to get used to the UAC prompts she encountered every time she installed or uninstalled software. I explained my rule of thumb for security prompts: if you started the action that requires privilege elevation, it’s OK. If it wasn’t you, you’d better find out who or what’s trying to get privilege before granting it. It’s like airline security: Did you pack your own bags? Do you know where they’ve been? Are you carrying packages for people you don’t know?Her biggest complaint at that point was that the computer was slow to boot. I ran the machine through PC Pitstop, running IE as Adminstrator, so that I could see what programs were running (see figure): nothing really jumped out at me for elimination. My only suggestion was to hibernate the computer between uses rather than shut it down completely, which got me a funny look.It turns out that the off switch on the computer is set to initiate hibernation, and my daughter had to work pretty hard to get it to shut down completely. Old habits die hard: she grew up with older systems, and had probably never considered that a laptop would be designed to hibernate.The next issue came up via email a few days later, but by then her mood was a bit more upbeat: Hi Dad, So, I love my new computer. And, my Word 2007 Pro is awesome as well. I just have one issue. The computer is obsessed with making back-ups, and every time I try to do a full back up, it fails saying that “this is already in use by another program.” I got 6 CDs into the backup when it failed. Grrrr. I’ve tried shutting down all the running programs, but still it fails. Any ideas?After a telephone conversation, I think I understand the problem, which seems to be two-fold. First, HP seems to have installed a control panel that nags when Windows Vista Backup and Restore has not made a successful backup. Second, the backup process can’t get at all the files on the PC.Can that be right? Isn’t the Vista backup function supposed to use a shadow copy? I’ve never tried that function myself: I’d be interested to hear from someone who has encountered the same problem and overcome it.I’ve reassured my daughter that she’s in good shape for backups even without the failed set, and that the failed set is probably still useful. Her absolute worst case after a disaster is that she’ll have to restore her computer to as-shipped condition from DVD and/or the image on her D: drive, scrub the “craplets,” reinstall Office 2007, copy her old files over the network, and copy her recent files from her CD-R and/or flash drive backups. Meanwhile, she’s going to find out if HP tech support is helpful. Software Development