WinXP on the wall, who's the most incompatible of them all?

Owners of the new shiny Windows XP operating system will be disappointed if they try to play another new shiny product - Disney's re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on DVD.

The company that created the DVD standard for linking content to the Web, InterActual, has posted a warning on its support site saying that the Snow White DVD simply will not run on Windows 2000 or XP.

"Some users that have newer systems with Windows 2000 or XP installed may experience playability failures with the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs DVD. The Walt Disney Company and the Microsoft Corporation are jointly addressing this matter, and expect to provide a resolution for consumers shortly," the post reads.

InterActual told CNet news that it's not its technology that is clashing with the OSes and that the DVD runs fine on Windows 98. It seems as though Disney simply didn't test the DVD with either 2000 or XP. Which is a bit stupid considering Microsoft is spending most of the week hyping XP as the saviour of the world.

It's really out of Microsoft's hands and Disney, keen not to drop the gun on its other foot, is claiming a patch will be ready by the end of this week. Which, considering the company has known about the problem for at least a fortnight, may not end up being 100 per cent true.

For those that are trying to remember the story of Snow White, she was a lovely looking lady who lived with a nasty stepmother but the animals liked her and would do the housework. The Queen (it was a monarchy), had a talking mirror whose specialised subject was beauty (we never found out if its knowledge extended beyond this).

As such, the Queen, a vain but saucy woman, kept asking it who was the fairest of them all - "all" presumably meaning everyone in her kingdom. The mirror normally told her it was her, which she liked enormously. She was a bit insecure and felt the need to ask the mirror every day.

Whether the mirror got fed up with this or simply had been unaware of Snow White before (somewhat undermining its assumed authority), one day it told the Queen that she had been usurped in her role of most beautiful person by one Snow White.

Needless to say, she dispatched a huntsman to find her, take her into the forest and kill her. The huntsman felt sorry for Snow White and let her go, but of course the Queen knew all about it because the mirror took a certain amount of malicious pleasure the next morning in telling her that she was still second best. Meanwhile Snow White had shacked up with seven small miners.

What does Queenie do? Turn herself into an old hag and give SW a poisoned apple of course. Snow White, who may be good looking but ain't the brainiest of the bunch, eats it, falls asleep and that's your lot.

And that's it. The small blokes (they were dwarfs - giving the film its title) cleaned up after her, gave her bed baths and the like for a whole year until a prince, who everyone agrees was really charming, popped by and took a fancy to her.

The prince had some strange sublingual mutation which many found distasteful but fortunately for Snow White happened to produce an antidote to the sleeping potion. He dribbled a bit of his saliva on her lips and before you knew it she was up and away. She ditched the dwarfs who were, frankly, not quite right in the head and rode off with her new man. Can't remember what happened to the Queen.

Anyway, the question is: which dwarf is Disney most like in its total failure to realise that people may want to use the DVD in a machine running Windows XP? Doc, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy or Dopey? [Hint: the answer's Dopey.] ®

Related Link

InterActual's posting