7 Jul 2005 Burgundavia   » (Journeyer)

Adventures with Windows XP

As some of you may already know, I have most of the training towards an MCSE, and actually have an MCP (on Windows 2000 Server). However, I exited the MS game in late Febuary and am glad I did so. (BTW, I am still looking for a job)

Since yesterday, I have been house sitting for my parents, looking after their two dogs. While this does bring the advantage of having a vehicle at my disposal, it also means that I am forced to use one of 2 computers: my father's brand-new XP Home laptop, or my step-mother's ancient 98 box.

Suddenly, I am reminded all over again why I chose to exit the Windows world. My list of complaints includes the following:

  • The start menu is an unusable piece of crap. Honestly, my "slow" gnome-menu loads quicker than this. Also, applications are not sorted according to function, but by whatever the application developmer wanted, usually name.
  • There is no easy way to burn an ISO. I decided to download the Colony 2 live cd to test on my fathers laptop, as part of a general goal of moving him over. After I downloaded the ISO, I right-clicked on it, and looked for "Burn to CD" thingy. Not there. Turns out I have to trust some random bits from the internet for this one.
  • My father also recently purchased a digital SLR camera. It is very nice, but the software they ship with it is, as can be assumed, terrible.
  • Select and middle-click paste. I never realized exactly how much I use this until I tried to do it on brothers XP machine (he has since migrated to Ubuntu and loves it).
  • The machine is unacceptably slow, even after a cold boot. The problem only gets worse as the time goes on. My Breezy box has now run for 1 week and is still as responsive as ever, despite this little bug eating all my memory. There is no particular reason that my home machine could not run for months without being shutdown, due to smart packaging (not needing to reboot after a software install. See next) and good design.
  • My father also asked me to setup an old parallel port scanner on his machine. Turns out the old software that comes with it freezes both my parents machines hard. So hard that only a hardware reset works. Umm, ok then. Also, when installing the software, I was forced to restart the machine.
  • The old default windows widgets are truly ugly but turning on the happy XP default theme not only uses more memory but also causes me to think I am back in pre-school again.

Now that being said, there are some nice things about XP. Because this version of XP was created by Sony for the laptop, the wireless and the rest of the fancy hardware just works. Now, if they stopped all their stupid Sony-crap programs from starting up by default...

(This blog post written on a Windows XP machine and thus may contain viruses (or is it virii?))

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