I Miss Jayne — Vista Be Damned!

A couple of months ago, my beloved XP laptop began a journey down that slow, agonizingly painful path to nothingness.  Even though I stripped every unnecessary background job and visual feature off him, he just sputtered through every reboot.  The launch of any single software program took at least 50% of the CPU and if I wanted to actually do something once I had it open, like -um- open a file, an email, a webpage, an mp3, that single action took the rest of the CPU and I had to sit like a lump on a log for 3 minutes or so staring at the frozen screen until there was enough CPU available for me to move the mouse and click on something else, which would lead to another 3 minutes of agony.

So, I accepted my reality.  Jayne was croaking.  I needed a replacement and superfast.  I began looking online.  I immediately ruled out Apple & Macs — sorry, guys, I’m sure they have their pro’s (I hear they’re excellent for multimedia work and graphics), but I work in a Windows world.  I also immediately ruled out Dell.  Dell burned me with a crappy built-in wireless card and extremely crappy customer service back when they had all of those commercials about how wonderful their customer service was.  That laptop had an unnatural death and it was barely paid for.

I really loved Jayne, my HP, even when it began to be outdated.  I felt that it had been sturdy, survived cats sitting on the keyboard, survived being knocked over by rambunctious puppy play, and had been as far away as Scotland and New Mexico.  So, I decided to go with another HP (after checking out Toshiba’s outrageously high prices).

Now, here’s the thing.  I’m a programmer, but I program in a very specific arena.  I don’t usually worry much about hardware.  Occassionally I have to ask about Windows 2003 servers or Unix servers for ftp keepalive purposes, but generally, it’s all tcp/ip and ip addresses and ports and I don’t care what kind of machine I’m connecting to.  So, it turns out that laptop hardware has changed quite a bit since September 2005 when I bought Jayne.  Looking through the system breakdowns and options, I recognized GB and RAM and very little else.  I was shocked that the computers were standardly coming with over 3 GB of harddrive.  I had 100 GB on mine and I was barely using 50 – 60 GB, which is why I was frustrated that I couldn’t replace my 30 GB iPod when I dropped it — I had to buy the 120 GB iPod Classic for the equivalent features, color, and size; yet I’m still only using 11 GB and that includes my audiobooks, an episode of Eureka, and 3 episodes of House.  Quite honestly I couldn’t imagine what people were doing with all of that space.

I also didn’t understand all of the new lingo for the internals.  I remember when just knowing you had a the highest number Pentium out so far was what you wanted, but…what the hell is a “Intel Centrino processor dual core and do I want it? What will it do for me? There are mysterious ports for eSATA and HDMI and other strange things, which oddly enough allow you to also plug in a USB (though I question if the USB connection through these slots actually works correctly). There are no more floppies (though you can still purchase them at WAL-Mart), but there’s a multi-media card reader and one of those slots where you pull out the plastic card that appears to have no use, which I’ve never figured out what to do with since everything always requires the use of a USB port. The CD player is actually a DVD/CD player/writer that supposedly can play Blu-Ray and theoretically I can hook my laptop up to my television, which has a screen only several inches bigger than the 17″ laptop, to watch movies from Netflix, the DVD player, and iTunes.

The big bummer was that Windows won’t let them sell XP installed on the new laptop — at least that was the big decision last Summer.  So much against my better judgment, I finally succumbed to the virus that is Vista.  Now I know why my mother thinks her computer is hiding her files and other nasty things and I apologize for thinking she was over-exaggerating because she simply is computer-challenged.

I am a computer person.  I like to get into the OS and tweak and adjust and learn.  I like to personalize.  I like things to be “just so”.

I also like compatibility between computer products.  For example, I believe that if something worked in XP, it should work in Vista.  I realize that Microsoft doesn’t agree.  However, I think Vista has been out long enough that work arounds or upgrades should be available.  I think that anything that’s come out since Vista’s debut and is Windows-compatible, should be Vista-compatible.

Apparently, not everyone agrees.

For example, the new Palm Smartphone that I upgraded to just this Fall?  Well, it’s kind of compatible, but only if I don’t connect to my Vista laptop with it’s USB connector/charger.  If I want to sync the data, I can do so using a Bluetooth connection, and I have to charge my Palm Smartphone with a charger I purchased through Amazon.com.  Oh, and it wasn’t easy getting Vista to recognize the Smartphone was “out there” beyond the firewall thanks to Vista’s overzealous security methods — Vista should be running Homeland Security I tell you.  It took me a few days to figure it out and I couldn’t tell you what I did now to make it work.

My Linksys Wireless-G WPS54G print server that served me so well under XP refused to work with Vista.  Even when I could get Vista to recognize its meger existence, it would not print test pages on my HP5610.  I tried every single tip and trick and fix I could find through Google.  There are apparently people who managed to get it to work.

So, now I have a NetGear WPS606, which has slots for 2 printers.  It took me all friggin’ Friday night (yes, I have no social life; get over it) but Vista finally recognized the damned thing and I got several test pages printed on the HP5610.  My next chore will be to add the Canon Pixma photo printer.  I just have to set aside some time and purchase a rather large Dunkin Donuts Coffee Coolata with Whip.

And this weekend I installed PrimoPDF, which you would think would be an easy thing.  You just download and run the setup wizard and you’re good to go for printing files to PDF files.  After all, that’s what the instructions say.  The only thing is that whenever I’d try to write to a PDF file, I’d set up the document, click “print”, it would look like it was starting to print, then the scroll screen would disappear, and the PDF file would disappear into Vista purgatory.  Just ¤poof¤!  Well, once again, thanks to Google, I found the fix.  Apparently, Vista restricts the permissions on the Temp folder, which is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen Vista do.  The only users who have access to Temp are the Administrator and anyone with Administrator permissions; however, just because you have Administrator permissions doesn’t mean that if you run programs that they get the benefit of those permissions.  If the program is set up for everyone to use, then that program only has “everyone” permissions.  How stupid is that?  So, I had to go into the Temp folder properties and change the permissions so that anyone could write to it.  I also had to go into the Documents and PrimoPDF folders and do the same thing.

I just don’t understand why Vista makes everything so damned hard.  I can’t imagine my mother doing any of those things.  Vista is not user-friendly or plug-n-play.  I’m almost afraid to install anything when I need to because it always takes the rest of the day.  I’d rather clean my toilet.

I finally turned the User Account Control off this weekend.  I decided that it was causing more trouble than it was worth.  At first I thought it might be helpful in protecting the computer and warning me of things but it’s really just become a nuisance and my albatross.

And of course, as soon as I invested in Vista, all of a sudden, Microsoft started talking about their next new big OS.  Puey on them!

P.S. In case you were wondering, my new laptop is named Djaq.  1000 pts to the person who can guess where the name comes from and how to pronounce it phonetically.

Tagged as: Apple, Bluetooth, Djaq, Eureka, Google, HOUSE, iPod, IT, Jayne, laptop hardware, Microsoft Vista, OS, Palm, PrimoPDF, Smartphone, software, USB, Wal-Mart, work