I bought a new computer...
Saturday, 29. March 2008, 01:41:56
Yup. the unexpected success of the Asus EeePC has had quite an effect on the lower end of the laptop market, prices have dropped sharply, and with the novelty of the pink computer wearing off dealers are also having to drop prices to shift the last few of them.
Me I don't care what colour the thing is as long as it does what I want, and so it was that I took posession of a pinkPC for just a penny below the budget I had set for buying a 2nd hand machine.
It's lucky I'm not a newbie is all I can say. Anyone new to computers would have run off screaming, convinced that they would never get the hang of these devilish machines and their strange incomprehendable language, and that's really not fair because it's the computer's fault.
Or the idiots who let it out of the factory in this state.
It comes with a quick start manual which basically shows where to put the battery and where the start button resides, after that you have to use the main manual which comes on a CD. The first thing that happens when I switch on is that Windows warns me that I have no anti-virus software, would I like it to help me to do something about this?
Of course what it doesn't realise is that I'm not online, so firstly I'm in no danger of viruses at all, and secondly it can't help me to do anything about the situation because all its solutions are online. Sure enough, it tries to find a web address and then reports that I have a modem problem. No I don't. I'm just not online yet.
One problem I am having is with the sound. It's very low and I can't get the volume up and down buttons to do anything, so I load the CD with the manual on it and it asks me if I'm using XP or Vista. Now me, I can answer that, but if I were new to this thing I'm not certain if I'd even understand the question.
I answer the question and the computer asks me what I want to open the file with. It's a .pdf file so I want Acrobat or some other pdf reader. There's no Acrobat loaded. I look for a MS alternative. Nope. They've actually been and gone and done it. They've supplied a manual, on CD, in a format that the computer can't read...
It shouldn't be like this. I'm astounded to discover that Microsoft and the world's computer manufacturers are still churning out felgercarb like this. It's over a decade since I built my own computer out of miscellaneous bits and loaded it with Linux, and I didn't have any of these problems. It can be done. OK, I am having trouble getting the current version of Opera to identify itself as Opera but that's pretty pathetic compared to the hurdles and hoops newcomers are still having to negotiate.
The one thing that can't be done is boycott China. I've been trying to boycott Chinese goods since Tiananmen Square and over the years they've done nothing to convince me to change, so this computer was not built in China.
Unfortunately just about everything inside it is.
Have the industries of the world actually thought over the rationale of getting everything manufactured in the same country?
It didn't start out that way, but it seems like this entire blog has been little more than a list of further evidence that capitalism still isn't working.
Me I don't care what colour the thing is as long as it does what I want, and so it was that I took posession of a pinkPC for just a penny below the budget I had set for buying a 2nd hand machine.
It's lucky I'm not a newbie is all I can say. Anyone new to computers would have run off screaming, convinced that they would never get the hang of these devilish machines and their strange incomprehendable language, and that's really not fair because it's the computer's fault.
Or the idiots who let it out of the factory in this state.
It comes with a quick start manual which basically shows where to put the battery and where the start button resides, after that you have to use the main manual which comes on a CD. The first thing that happens when I switch on is that Windows warns me that I have no anti-virus software, would I like it to help me to do something about this?
Of course what it doesn't realise is that I'm not online, so firstly I'm in no danger of viruses at all, and secondly it can't help me to do anything about the situation because all its solutions are online. Sure enough, it tries to find a web address and then reports that I have a modem problem. No I don't. I'm just not online yet.
One problem I am having is with the sound. It's very low and I can't get the volume up and down buttons to do anything, so I load the CD with the manual on it and it asks me if I'm using XP or Vista. Now me, I can answer that, but if I were new to this thing I'm not certain if I'd even understand the question.
I answer the question and the computer asks me what I want to open the file with. It's a .pdf file so I want Acrobat or some other pdf reader. There's no Acrobat loaded. I look for a MS alternative. Nope. They've actually been and gone and done it. They've supplied a manual, on CD, in a format that the computer can't read...
It shouldn't be like this. I'm astounded to discover that Microsoft and the world's computer manufacturers are still churning out felgercarb like this. It's over a decade since I built my own computer out of miscellaneous bits and loaded it with Linux, and I didn't have any of these problems. It can be done. OK, I am having trouble getting the current version of Opera to identify itself as Opera but that's pretty pathetic compared to the hurdles and hoops newcomers are still having to negotiate.
The one thing that can't be done is boycott China. I've been trying to boycott Chinese goods since Tiananmen Square and over the years they've done nothing to convince me to change, so this computer was not built in China.
Unfortunately just about everything inside it is.
Have the industries of the world actually thought over the rationale of getting everything manufactured in the same country?
It didn't start out that way, but it seems like this entire blog has been little more than a list of further evidence that capitalism still isn't working.
WIDGETIZE