2007.6.27.2

Once again Microsoft has pissed me off… but they had help this time from one usual suspect and an unexpected accomplice: Yahoo.

Usually I like Yahoo. I’ve liked Yahoo for a while and have been a long-time customer, both as a user of free stuff and as a paying email customer as well as in different areas. So far everything has worked out well, and I generally have always maintained that Yahoo was an improvement on the web, though their general internetness is a little shallow (nice messaging server access, nothing else).

Anyway, enough said. Now it seems that the war between Microsoft and Yahoo over the web is over, and since MSN/evil-restrictive-empire-of-toadies-and-affiliates has driven business away, Yahoo has become the dominat web portal. This opened up space for a new player, which turned out to be Google, which is sad in a way, since Lycos or Excite or AltaVista could have been really cool. Google has some scary visions of how the future “should be” which I feel invade my privacy, and I think will eventually abuse their position on accident, thinking they have some higher calling to preserve freedom or love or something silly like that and end up being the thought police.

I bought a new computer the other day, an HP dv6000 laptop. It looks cool, has an AMD 64×2 Turion in it and some other nifty little things that won’t really matter on a day-to-day basis, and its way cheap. I brought it home. I started it up… and Vista took over…

Vista sucks. Everything on it bothers the crap out of you until you register things with Big Brother, HP has a “welcome to HP” screen which would not alow me to access my new system until I told HP all my dirty inner secrets, has a way over-loaded “maintenance” center that makes everything else (including me) wait on it, and generally drove me nuts (and drove me to kill all processes running, and delete and uninstall everything labelled “HP” as soon as possible).

I once everything that offended my privacy was appropriately dead, I decided to access my wireless router and see how well that would work out. Good news, I can download at well over 3 full real megs per second across the wireless network, bad news, Vista has a lot of annoying little crashes. Vista itself never died, but Internet Explorer sure did… a lot… including the first time I tried to run it. So did diferent messaging systems, Symantec Antivirus and the Windows Updater that is supposed to update my system to save it from annoying crashes. Again, thruogh it al, Vista itself never crashed… but once my system finally was updated I had to make it crash (i.e. reboot) to make the updates take effect… Yes, that’s right, Windows still cannot do a dynamic restart of a service to save its life.

I rebooted. It took forever first to shutdown, and then forever to start up again. I mean forever.

This annoyed me. When it started up (finally) I checked the system stats… as I suspected, everything runs clunky because I have only 512mb of RAM (which shouldn’t cause this sort of behaviour, though) and the big kicker… the version of VIsta that MS allows to be pre-installed by vendors is only 32 bit and single-core! I have 7/8ths of my computer sitting idle in a sense! This is simply unacceptable.

I tried to install WoW also, because I suck at life… and it runs slower than molasses. Screw this.

So that brings me to my final attempt to bring sanity to the world (and the way I found I could download over 3 real megs per second if there is no bottleneck in the way). I downloaded the DVD image for the new Fedora Core 7 release in a few minutes and installed that over Vista because it sucked.

Everything works just fine out and the system humms along at a ridiculous processing pace. I still need more RAM to do things I like such as photo manupulation or really big compiling, but overall its a massive improvement… and WoW runs ok under WINE, though that’s not exactly a method I would recommend to anyone who is going to be the main tank for an endgame guild. (That I know what this means is a scary thing, in a way…)

Where does Yahoo fall in here? They left evidence of their new (and still semi-secret) pact with MS all over my browser. I had a Yahoo toolbar annoyingly preinstalled on my IE. I also had a pre-installed Symantec toolbar preinstalled that shows status buttons all the time, along with a few other toolbars I never wanted… and still no mouse gestures that I’m addicted to from using Opera all the time… and they have the gall to bring up a huge new “Welcome to tabbed browsing” window that fills the whole screen the first time you open a new tab up… Thanks, jackass, I already knew what tabbed browsing was, and don’t pretend that this is your own idea, either…

I should go back and get some screenshots to put up here, because this was a relentlessly irritating experience, setting up my new HP laptop… the powers of HP, MS and Yahoo combined made it a horrible experience. Free stuff (i.e. Fedora Core 7) made it all worthwhile in the end, though. By the way, HP did a good job on the hardware, even if their software is only worthy of a big sweaty dump.