Re-visiting hell

Posted on February 11, 2013 by KG

Wabbit has been ensconced in the sixth floor of a waterfront hotel for the past few days, drinking beer, eating Italian food–and setting up this Lenovo ThinkPad which has a fresh install of Vista business edition.
What a clunky, counter-intuitive heap of shit this is. 120+ security updates, which took two and a half hours on a reasonable wireless connection. A whole series of idiotic, roundabout processes needed to set the bloody thing up and a lack of information at every stage. It’s a good reminder of why I changed to a Mac and the brilliant OS-X operating system. How Microsoft gets away with selling products which aren’t fit for purpose beats me. The same jobs on the Mac would have taken half an hour, max.

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29 Responses to Re-visiting hell

  1. Ronbo says:
    February 11, 2013 at 19:58

    @KG:

    Simple.

    Because Microsoft is more Leftist PC than Mac and gave Obama more money in 2012 for his reelection campaign.

  2. KG says:
    February 11, 2013 at 20:03

    Figures. But they were just as bad under other Presidents.

  3. jonno1 says:
    February 11, 2013 at 20:19

    Vista??? Try Windows 7.

    • KG says:
      February 11, 2013 at 20:34

      No bloody way, jonno. I wouldn’t give the bastards at Microsoft a cent.
      If a car or a refrigerator needed the constant upgrades and fixes Microsoft operating systems need simply in order to keep functioning, their manufacturers would have been sued out of business within a few months–and rightly so.
      After using lots of msoft OS’ from the day the first one was released right up to Win7 on somebody else’s machine, I see the same dysfunctional shit occurring again and again.
      I’ve a few pet peeves about OS-X in it’s various incarnations, but nothing like the sheer fury the idiocy of MS reduces me to.
      (just restarted this heap of shit. If I do that on my Mac, it comes up ready to roll. Not this clunky heap of crap–there are still two windows to load before I can start work. And that’s just one minor niggle)

  4. kepiblanc says:
    February 11, 2013 at 21:01

    KG, you could dowload a copy of some Linux – Ubuntu, Kubuntu or some such – ‘burn’ it to a USB-stick, plug it into your Lenovo ThinkPad and have a lightning fast, rock-solid machine in a matter of half an hour. :razz:

    • KG says:
      February 11, 2013 at 21:06

      http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_good.gif
      Absolutely, Kepiblanc. I just got the latest Ubuntu disc and that’s exactly what I’m going to do when we get home. :grin:
      The only question is whether the wireless stick will install ok, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

  5. KG says:
    February 11, 2013 at 21:06

    And good to see you again, after all this time. http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

  6. Elijah says:
    February 11, 2013 at 21:14

    How odd you post this. My Windows 7 gaming laptop has just corrupted it’s registry about 30 minutes ago.

    This comment is coming to you via Asus’s ExpressGate built in software.

  7. KG says:
    February 11, 2013 at 21:20

    My OS-X Lion (and Leopard before that) has never failed, never picked up a virus, and not one thing I’ve plugged into it has ever triggered a demand that I find drivers for it.
    When updates are due, it sets out clearly what each update does, the size of it and gives the option of installing it–or not. All you get from Microshit is a string of numbers and in order to check what a particular update is, it’s necessary to go to the MS site and hunt down that particular number. Unbelievably stupid and time-consuming.

    • Elijah says:
      February 11, 2013 at 21:48

      I’m tending towards agreeing with you on this issue. Most of the up and coming consoles are going to fill my gaming wants anyway. Plus it is really getting old to try and troubleshoot issue where it used to be fun. I don’t have time to screw around which is why I’m leaving this fix for the weekend. I’ve got three other devices to access the Internet Crusader Rabbit anyway.

      What is really disappointing is that Windows 7 was billed to fix all the crap MS made us go through and be a solid competitor to Mac OSX. Windows 8 is even worse apparently.

      • KG says:
        February 11, 2013 at 22:12

        I’ve been looking at gaming consoles, Elijah and they seem to be a far more sensible solution that asking one’s personal computer to be a jack-of-all-trades.
        I haven’t seen a good review of W8 yet–most seem to damn with faint praise.
        Off to bed–we have a 500km drive in the morning. If you have a particular console in mind, would you let me know, please? I’ve no idea what to choose.

  8. Elijah says:
    February 11, 2013 at 23:26

    I own a Playstation 3. I’ve had no issues with it and it’s got a good selection of games.

  9. Darin says:
    February 11, 2013 at 23:33

    Running Vista on my desktop here at home.Didn’t like it at first,but I was one of the first to get it also.Simple fix for most Vista problems is to put it on a diet.It is a bloated pig of an OS after all.
    Run something like Process scanner and see how many running processes it has up(usually twice as many as any other version of Windoze)then start turning off anything you don’t need or want.System restore is one of the worst,it’s useless anyway,just back up your files once a week like you should be doing anyway.
    Don’t ever run Norton or Macafee on a Windoze machine,AVG is many times better and simply sits in the back ground sunning itself until something interesting comes along.Never had any problems with AVG.Norton 360 trashed my CD burner drivers.I demanded and got a full refund from Norton for that POS.

    Vista and Win7 sucked so bad that business here refused to switch over from XPs2 64bit.Such was the revolt that MS still supplies and supports XPsp2 even though it’s going on 15 years old.

    The desktop I recently setup at work is running XPs2Pro and it’s bullet proof.It’s only a 1.2G machine,but out performs my 2.4G machine running Vista.
    I was told that Win 7 was the beginning of the end for Windoze desktop operating systems with Win8 being intended for tablets and laptops primarily.

    • KG says:
      February 12, 2013 at 11:03

      I’d never even consider using Norton, Darin. Norton+Winshit= a marriage made in hell.
      I went looking for running processes and what’s a 2-click business in OSx doesn’t even seem possible in Vista. :shock:
      And I see that Macafee is bundled with Flash player downloads now! Stuff that……
      Now I’m home it’s time to look at Ubuntu.http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

  11. KG says:
    February 12, 2013 at 16:14

    YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Linux Ubuntu installed. It recognised the wireless stick, no problem. 32 minutes from go to whoa–including automatically partitioning the HDD. http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

  12. kepiblanc says:
    February 12, 2013 at 22:35

    Congrats, KG! – And thanks for your kind words! – Not that I’ve been away – I’m here on a daily basis – but up here in the cold North we’re quite busy showelling snow and Allahbarbarians out of the way – seemingly an endless undertaking…

    BTW: One of the elegant features of *buntu is that you can have several different ‘desktops’ alongside each other. So if you don’t like Ubuntu’s interface, just open a terminal and:
    “sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop” – or / and “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop”
    So at login-time, you can choose between them. And then tweek everything to your hearts content… :razz:

    • KG says:
      February 13, 2013 at 05:28

      Now that’s pretty cool. :smile: I took a look at terminal and recoiled in horror–shades of DOS….
      But, we will try it. Faint heart never won elegant desktop, after all. Thanks for that.
      You don’t happen to know if there’s an equivalent of Mac’s indispensable sticky notes, do you?

      Shovelling snow……hmmm…..
      Nope, can’t get my head around it. Penguins. Ice. Shivering….

  13. kepiblanc says:
    February 13, 2013 at 05:54

    DOS??? – No way. The Linux terminal is 100 orders of magnitude more powerful than the brain-dead Windoze-command-prompt. Scary maybe, considering that in the terminal you can do everything – provided you give the ‘root’ password. But then again, for the faint-at-heart there is a handful of graphical applications for almost everything. For example, if you want a note-taking app, you could just use the ‘Ubuntu Software Center’ and search for ‘notes’. Or install ‘synaptic’ and search among some 23,000 apps.

    Personally, I prefer to get my hands dirty and do things the ‘infantry-way’: ‘sudo apt-get install ‘ if you know its name. That way you can follow the inner workings of the monster on-screen. Try that command on one – or more – of these apps:

    xpad, knotes, xfce4-notes, rhinote, tomboy, note, keepnote, etc., etc. ad infinitum.

    In you case I would: ‘sudo apt-get install synaptic xpad’ – which will give you the sofware-manager ‘synaptic’ and the sticky notes, ‘xpad’. – enjoy!

    • KG says:
      February 13, 2013 at 06:23

      :smile: Good stuff..I’ve copied those suggestions and I’ll give it a go later today, Kepi. Thanks for that.
      The huge amount of support and help out there for Linux is very, very impressive–it’s a damn shame MS has such a stranglehold on school computers, otherwise kids wouldn’t grow up thinking Windows is the only game in town.