Thursday, March 29, 2007

Anti-Windows Rant #1

I hate to be a complainer, but I just have to let people in on what I had to deal with this past weekend, I wasted yet another weekend of my life because engineers at Microsoft didn’t take the time to do a very few simple things that would have made my life easier.

My cousin calls me friday afternoon, to meet up… we hang out yada yada, then we get back home and he asks me to take a look at his laptop… its running slow (big shocker…), I fire up the laptop only to see 14 icons in the taskbar with basically every POS software that can come with your computer and possibly some spyware in there too… Naturally, I disable all his startup stuff, reboot and bam, system registry hive is corruped… after banging my head on the table for an hour in regret of agreeing to work on a windows machine, I try recovery console… I get prompted for a login, crap… reset the password… the new password doesnt work, can’t recover the computer because i can’t log in… okay.. reinstall xp home, his key “works” but when it starts up it forces activation without the nifty 30 day trial period… I go to activate, the screen is blank, activation mysteriously just doesn’t work, no reason why, just fails… Ok, great, can’t change the key because i can’t login, so i have to reinstall with another key, this key also “works” but now I find that key has reached its maximum activation limit.

Wonderful, so I proceed to very annoyed for another hour while I install XP Pro Corporate with my work license just so I can get the crap off of the computer, great everything works, no activation required… am I the only person who find it strange that a company who makes money because of piracy is working so hard to make sure I can’t use this computer…weird… anyway on to Sub-rant about Toshiba’s Support…

So now I go to the Toshiba support website, downloaded the drivers for the laptop, and only 1 of the drivers actually works. You have to understand this is after 5 hours of trying to simply get data off of the laptop, I am practically at my limit… So I have to go and download drivers from the manufacturer (1 of which also didn’t work) only to have a different registry hive corrupted 3 days later causing my cousin to lose more data. One would assume the hard drive is failing, but it showed no signs of it other than random things dying, and it passed all the tests I ran on it…

The lesson learned here is not how crappy Windows or Microsoft is, but moreso that I’ve wasted so many hours of my life dealing with these types of problems, so many precious hours of my life have been spent dealing with issues that shouldnt need to be dealt with. From now on I will go out of my way to aviod dealing with any Microsoft products, be it a mouse, and O/S or really-crappy-defective-non-standard-insecure browser

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Actual web designing?

Wow, I never would have though, but I am actually seeing that I can do _some_ web designing after doing quite a bit of div/cssish kind of stuff for the last 4 months at work, yikes I almost seem like I know what I’m doing… yeah, I said almost =P

In other news, I have officially showed two others the light into the world of Apple. My friend Jason decided to get a Macbook, and my Pops jumped on the bandwagon with an iMac, wise choices guys.