Computer Trouble

No, you won’t get a new image today. Neither yesterday’s nor anything from today, but please let me whine a little!

I could have tried to find out what’s wrong with my computer, but it was ready for a major update anyway, thus I’ve bought a new one today. It’s a standard HP computer with a nice Core 2 Quad 9550 CPU and a weak ATI graphics card. 4GB memory, a 750GB hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit.

Well, I’ve expected Vista to fly on this hardware (here in Vienna I had an Athlon XP 3000+ before), but, honestly, it does not. Yes, the Desktop effects are instantaneous, but so they are on my Ubuntu, running on an Athlon XP 2000+. Everything else is pretty slow. Booting Vista on this considerably faster hardware does not feel faster than booting Ubuntu on the seven year old processor. Apart from that, Vista is the same old Windows that it ever was, with all its stupidity.

An example? Add a hard drive. Physically, I mean. Now boot your computer. You’d expect … something, anything, but nothing happens. OK, you know that in Good Old Windows you’d have to find the management console, would have to select to manage disks, and there you would have found your disk. Same here. Well, it was not too hard to find. I selected the new disk, right-click, menu, new partition, select a drive letter, answer some questions that may well be unanswerable for any newcomer, say “Finish” and … get scolded that of course I should have had initialized the drive first.

OK. Now that was stupid of me. I had not remembered the correct sequence! Well, now back to the menu that you get with right-click and … it’s not there. Nothing about initializing! Stupid me again. Of course it’s the menu that you get when you not right click into the rectangle that symbolizes the drive, but on the label to its left! What else?

In less than a second the drive is initialized, and only now can you create the partition. Of course you have to click through the whole wizard again, again answering its questions. It could have remembered, it should have done so, but it certainly did not 🙂

And so on. Sorry for the rant, but I feel better now. I suppose I can post Tuesday’s image tomorrow from the train. I travel into the weekend one day earlier this week. It’s a four hour’s drive and if I am lucky, I may even manage to get more than one post done. See you tomorrow.


There are 3 comments

Ted   (2008-10-08)

As I read your troubles here on the monitor of my MacBook Pro ... you know the part about an operating system that has become notoriously legendary among Mac users... and what PC users go through between opening the box and using their apps... Well, not too worry, honestly... reeeeely.... I did not smirk even a tiny tiny tiny bit. Nope... nor did i gig (a gig is a very small part of a giggle), nor make any chortling sound. Nope.. nope... just shuddered along with you and thanked The Lord Of The CPUs thatit wasn't my story but one I was just reading all of that here on the monitor of my MacBook Pro...

Of course I feel in no way smugly superior... well... not smugly exactly... Um... and not EXACTLY superior. No, just an ordinary kind of guy who's reading this on the monitor of his MACBOOK PRO....

Okay... your turn... remember the problems I had a few months back with the predecessor of this machine that's under my typing fingers? There may not be a God, but something sure does distribute enough computer-pain for us all, huh?

Instead of these babies, maybe we should buy us a couple of high tech abacuses?

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Andreas   (2008-10-08)

Oh yeah, I tell'ya 🙂

Most painful is, that the reason seems to have been the 1 TB hard disk where I store my images. Of course that's all duplicated and I'll simply carry the new hard disk to Carinthia to again have an exact copy, but the images of Monday are gone. Tough. I pretty much liked "724 - Deep inside your Dreams"

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Thomas   (2008-10-18)

Andreas, your original post made me grin with that "been there, done that" feeling. So far I always ended up with the part that involves formatting the harddrive and re-installing XP.

@Ted: yeah, the Mac-Users... We have some of them here in our department. True enough, they are spared a lot of the pains that we PC-user have to go through.

They have their special ones.

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