On my return from the AGU conference, I rented a car to get home from the airport. It was late and I took what the clerk gave me without noticing. I got to the car and noticed it was a Ford Fusion. It was significantly more roomy than the Suzuki I had driven less than a week ago. There was room for my legs as well as for someone to sit behind me. The style was very nice. The dashboard was sleek and all the buttons well placed.

As for power, I had enough power that even with another person in the vehicle with me, and our carryon luggage, I was able to glide up big hills.

The seat was confortable with good lumbar support. The radio even had satelite radio. I did not use the radio but for a second or two to see how well I could work it.

If I had a need for a medium sized sedan I would strongly consider the Fusion.

I just drove to the airport in a rental car. I was given a Suzuki SX4 sedan. I am tall and did not expect to fit very well. I complained to the rental clerk that I have never fit well into Suzukis perviously. He was kind and asked that I try it first. To my surprise, I had ample leg room as the driver but no one would have been able to sit behind me, not even a child. However, the drivers seat was rather narrow and my hips hurt from driving the 90 miles to the airport.

The controls: shifter, wipers, cruise, radio and air/heater seemed ok to me. Nothing special but good enough to not be noticed. I did have a little bit of slow down going up a big pass. I was in the car alone with a large carry on bag and a backpack so not a lot of extra weight. Certainly not as much as say three adults would be.

For myself, I would probably not buy it. For someone that is not considered tall this would be a decent car for commuting (not up big hills), to run around with a couple little kids, or for an older couple.

I have been stalled for some time in my progress in upgrading my wife's HP laptop to MS Windows 7. I received an error during the upgrade and MS Windows Vista shut it down.

I figured I would just have to re-install Vista and perform the upgrade on a fresh install. I didnt have time and thus procrastinated the day.

Today my wife was trying to install a game onto the laptop and it would not allow the game to install, even with entering the admin password. It needed, for some reason, the user to actually be an admin. I tried to log in as the admin and it failed. the password was accepted and it proceeded about 15 seconds. Then it simply failed saying "the user profile can not be loaded" and returned to the login screen. This was not acceptable. I spent a bit of time with google trying to find a solution to the problem. I found the solution here. In order to boot into safe mode I had to pull up the msconfig dialog and tell it to always boot into safe mode. It then auto-logged in and assumed I had admin privileges. Once I changed the registry key I changed the msconfig back to a normal boot process.

As soon as I logged in as the admin I was prompted to put in the upgrade disk to finish the upgrade. Apparently you need to be logged in as the actual admin (or a user with admin privileges) not just as a user with access to the admin password. It finished in less than an hour.

Thus total time I spent trying to get the upgrade to work was less than about 5 hours. This includes time spent with google and trying to log in as the admin. Also includes trying three times to get the data to copy to the system.

After a reboot I was running MS Windows 7. I must say the hidden backgrounds are beautiful! but I will leave that for another day. As for now, I actually like the feel of MS Windows 7 including the menu. I know, for someone that prefers GNU/Linux this is heresy.