28 Feb 2006 AlanHorkan   » (Master)

Windows still sucks

Despite my grumbling about being the de facto systems administrator for my family and not wanting to maintain Windows for another decade they went ahead and bought a new computer. Retraining my retired parents wasn't really an option so I grudgingly accepted Windows was the most suitable option but for that arguement to be valid I would need to disable all the Windows XP themes.
My brother works as a pimp^W^W^W in sales in Dell and had been working on my parents for months weeks and there was no way we were going to get broadband on our old clunker still quite happily running Windows 98. We ended up with a silvery Dell Dimension 3100. My fashion victim of a brother decided to order a flat LCD screen because it was trendy and took up less space. He did this despite or probably in spite of my strong advice to buy a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube, aka telly box) which gets much better picture for the same price.
With help from my cat wandering across the keyboard I cleared away the tedious End User License Agreements (EULA), those draconian click through licenses which I don't seriously believe are of any legal value. You don't have to put up with this abuse when installing or setting up Linux (with the unfortunate exception of the GIMP, but thankfully Ubuntu neutered the annoying startup questions, shamefully not all Live CD distributions have followed their lead).
They say "Windows is more stable than the last version" without intending to damn it with faint praise. Some claim they've never crashed Windows but they really cannot be trying very hard. One the first day of using a brand new machine it already locked up irretrievalbly and the failure was entirely reproducable. There was no grand bluescreen to truely admit defeat, everything just stopped. For the record I went into Display Properties, Advanced Settings, and flicked through the tabs labelled ATI but when I switched to the Options tab everything froze solid. ATI, Dell and Microsoft are all to blame.

We are not amused. Windows still sucks.

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