I cannot even count the ways…
My laptop died. Not an agonizing death, but a slow, whimpering, desperate kind of death that allowed me to save my files while the patient suffered on life support on the operating room table. It is not dead beyond repair, but the cost to repair would be about half the cost of a new machine.
So… new machine it is. I now have a Dell XPS 1530 courtesy of Future Shop. It is apparently last year’s model. I was looking at a Dell model that had 4 GB RAM and a 250 GB HD, for $749 (loonies). They had this other machine on the shelf with a price marked down to 849, I think. The sales guy asked if I would be interested if they could get me a good price… it has 3GB RAM and a 250 GB HD… and a fingerprint reader… and a cool slot for the dvd-rw… and originally listed at 1098 loonies. So he got the price down to 649 loonies (40% off!!!) and had a deal.
The machine is very nice.
But it has vista… need I say more?
Probably not, but I will. I have been working the last two days to get my programs up and running. A few minor glitches, but I think I am basically back in business.
What a nightmare Vista is though! There are some improvements and it is smarter than XP in some ways. But man, do I hate the dumbing down they are constantly doing. They are trying to make PCs more like Macs every time they upgrade. What is the point of that? There is a reason most people don’t have Macs.
I think I finally have come to grips with it and I suppose I will have to get used to it. But it is maddening how difficult it makes it for you to get into the guts of the thing and really tweak it to make it do what you want. I understand the concept of making computers easy for the masses and for marketing purposes, etc, but why do they have to make it tougher for those of us who like to tinker? Why save us from ourselves? Why not let us just crash these things by allowing us to mess with everything?
Well, I have figured out how to get to most of the things I want, but I still don’t like it.
But I won’t upgrade to the new MS Office and its stupid Ribbon for anything. They’ll have to pry the old Office out of my cold dead fingers!
Ok, if you have made it this far, you should win an award for rant endurance!
Hi Don,
I’m with you on hating Vista, but I’m one of those Mac users you clearly don’t see eye to eye with! Two of my Macs have to run Vista some of the time so my kids can get their schoolwork done. If I could replace one particular program with a Mac version, I would never run Vista (or Windows) at all.
You probably already know this about Macs but it wasn’t in support of your point — they run Unix underneath the pretty GUI, and they are eminently tweakable — you can get into the guts of the machine and do way more than you can with a PC (mostly because there is lots of open knowledge about unix/linux/bsd, and less about Windows internals), the trick of course, being that you have to know what you are doing. You mostly certainly can crash a Mac to your heart’s content if you play around with things using root permissions.
Other than the fact it can’t run Mac software, your new machine sounds pretty nice.
Thank you for the comment, Dave.
Well… I’ve used Macs. I even owned one – no, two – when I worked at a mortgage business that used them. I hate them too!
I think I am just an overall negative guy.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
“I think I am just an overall negative guy.”
Then I guess I shouldn’t bring up the Oilers this year, especially in comparison to the Canes! Hockey is finally getting hot around here again. About time, too, after our protracted slump!
Dave Barnhart
Well, everything looked good on paper!
I don’t follow it that much, although I do read a couple of hockey blogs. I sort of have a hazy idea of what is going on. I suppose if the Oilers were doing better I’d be more interested.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
Hi Don,
Thanks for reminding me about loonies and toonies! That alone was worth reading the article! At Mikes Family Restaurant in Charlottetown PEI the waitress did not know what an American “buck” was and I certainly did not know what a loonie was!
Keep up the good work…eh