Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion
Now we just have to clue Lauren in on the fact that she could save even more cash if she returned the Vista-license included with the laptop and installed Linux instead 
Or at least they’re getting better, Microsoft that is. According to a recent announcement on their website they’re finally releasing documentation for their horrid binary file formats. The ones used up until 2007 at least.
This is a good thing, a very good thing even. Granted that the documentation is accurate this means it’ll get easier for developers to interoperate with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies and that’s great since they have such a huge percentage of the market when it comes to wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentation software (i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Good news for data portability in other words and maybe now the OpenOffice-team won’t have to reverse engineer stuff until they’re blue in the face to make Microsoft Office documents work flawlessly within their own applications.
I’m calling this a good day for interoperability and open development.
First of all, how the hell can anybody be a Zune fanboy? I mean, take a look at it. It looks like crap, and on top of that just like everything else from the big Satan in Redmond it’s a handicapped device weighted down by DRM and functionality that only works a little bit (such as the retarded song-sharing). It’s ugly, stupid and the claim that it was the “iPod killer” is the silliest ever.
But still, there’s people actually delusional enough to willingly call themselves fans of the device. The most radical example of a Zune fanboy is the wacko with all those Zune tattoos and apparently now he’s taking it one step further – he wants to change his name to Microsoft Zune!!!
This guy is beyond retarded. I’m really at a loss for words here. It almost makes me want to buy an iPod just to counteract his “Zune-love”.
Yeah, you got me. That sure was sarcasm.
A couple of weeks ago I assisted my dad in buying a new laptop. Their old laptop was state of the art when they bought it about five years ago, but today it’s not really cutting it. So, time to buy a new one.
We went to the Sony Center and there my dad fell in love a pretty sweet Vaio-machine. It’s really a damn sexy piece of hardware and after inspecting the specs I gave it the thumbs-up. Only one problem really, it ran Windows Vista.
Now why is this a problem besides the fact that I loathe Windows? Well, it’s no secret that plenty of people that have gone from Windows XP to Vista have had and still are having a shitload of problems with Microsoft’s new and sparkly OS. My dad is not a complete computer imbecile at all, he’s a pretty ordinary user. He does some e-mail, surfs the web, plays some simple online games, does his banking online, organizes photos from his digital camera and things like that. Nothing fancy, nothing very advanced or odd at all.
So, while I was sceptical I thought that since good ‘ole dad’s computer habits were nothing out of the ordinary I said “what the hell” and hoped for the best.
Silly me. Stupid damn fuckin’ silly me.
I assisted with starting up the new laptop, installing all of the bundled software (Norton Security-stuff, a bunch of Google-apps, etc.) and configured it as best I could (remember that this was my first hands-on experience with Vista and that I haven’t been a regular Windows-user for over six years) and when I left my parents’ house it seemed to be working fine.
It took about two days until I received the first desperate call from my dad about his new computer “not working”. I googled some stuff and helped him out as well as I could over the phone. That was just the first of a seemingly never-ending series of calls, and all of them had to do with the new and fancy features in Vista fucking up my dad’s computing experience. In most cases I managed to hook him up with some sort of temporary work-around to the problem that he could live with until I had the time to get over there and get under the hood of the thing.
This week however things got so bad that my dad called me to say that he needs the old laptop back (I’d borrowed it to do some experimenting on) because the new one was completely unusable to him.
He couldn’t send e-mail properly, no applications except Internet Explorer 7 were allowed access to the internet, every time he tried to do just about anything useful he was driven mad by a bombardment of security pop-ups, the list goes on and on. What finally did it though was that IE and Vista wouldn’t allow him to install the certificate for his bank, thus making it impossible to pay their bills online. Awesome. Now tell me what’s so great about Vista again? Fuck.
So here’s someone that uses computers at work and has been using Windows XP both at home and at work for the past five years. Not a dimwit at all, actually pretty computer-savvy for a man in his late fifties. He goes out and buys a brand new awesome computer for $1800 with the “latest and greatest OS” and after three weeks he switches back to his old piece of cyberjunk because he’s being terrorized by Vista. Good one Microsoft.
Seriously, Vista must be the biggest piece of shit ever released by Microsoft. When experienced XP-users can’t get the damn thing to work properly you gotta call it a freakin’ failure, because that’s what it is. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s “more secure” (I doubt it) or looks snazzier than XP. It’s completely unusable to ordinary computer users as proven by my dad and many others I’ve read about online.
If it wasn’t for my dad having to run a few work-specific applications (which requires Windows) on his computer I’d have him buying a Mac or switching to Linux in a heartbeat.
And you know I’m gonna have to go over there next week and spend a hundred hours “fixing” that brand new Sony Vaio. Just because it’s been soiled by Vista. Damn.
Windows Vista is a sad piece of shit and once again Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for releasing such a pathetic excuse for an operating system.
So Microsoft has decided to pull the plug on the much despised FUD-campaign “Get the facts”. In it’s place it has erected a new site called “Windows Server compare”. As far as I can see this new site serves the exact same purpose, i.e. to throw dung on Linux, it’s just a new name for the same old crap. Completely ridiculous and pointless in other words. How hard is it to understand that bullshit and lies are just that no matter what you call them? It is particularly interesting how they seem to come down extra hard on Red Hat, with them being one of the major Linux-distributors that have refused to sign a patent-protection agreement with the devil (unlike Novell and Linspire, for example). “So Red Hat doesn’t wanna play with us? Then let’s behave like babies and make a site that makes them look bad. Oh, and our dad is stronger than Red Hat’s dad.” Geez… Microsoft needs to get a grip and concentrate on improving their deeply flawed software instead of embarking on new hate-campaigns against Linux. This is just plain embarrassing.
Bill Gates apparently got his period towards the end of his interview with Bob Garfield. Poor Bill. I hope he had his tampons close by. Have a sense of humor for fucks sake. What a baby…
