A very good friend of mine went to buy a computer. I couldn't go with her, and she's comfortable enough financially that she doesn't need to find the cheapest computer, so she went to an HP reseller.
I prefer for her (and other newbies) who can afford it to buy branded hardware anyway (although I wouldn't necessarily go with HP, I'd go with something a bit cheaper, say Lenovo, or Acer). The presumption being that the hardware quality will be a bit better than that of pure clones and while it's possible to build superior boxes out of clone parts (with careful study of all the parts/options), I didn't have the time to help her with that, and she didn't have the knowledge (frankly, neither do I, anymore) to do that.
Well, the HP reseller sold her on the "fastest computer available", it came with Vista Home Basic and with evaluation versions of Home/Student MS Office 2007.
Gripe #1: the computer came with 512MB of memory. For a $1000 computer, there should be
1-2GB of memory in there.
Gripe #2: the CPU is 1.6Ghz. That's not a speedster by any standard. My laptop is faster
than that.
Gripe #3: Vista Home Basic is ridiculously slow. A lot of the user interface has changed
so it's difficult to find things.
Gripe #4: MS Office 2007 has completely discombobulated the user interface. I couldn't find
anything until, after some random clicking, we clicked on the icon at the top right
of the window (sort of like the [Start] button, except Vista doesn't have a start
button anymore, it's just an icon, in Office, it's a something button that brings
down a vertical menu because the former horizontal menu isn't there anymore).
Even the random clicking didn't help much at first since the computer is so slow
that clicking on that icon didn't do anything (or it caused some flicker as the
menu popped down and then went away instantly due to clicks elsewhere).
Boy, I'd forgotten how dumb windows makes me feel. And the fact that MS changes the user interface gratuitiously and so radically makes me wonder about its future. I'm not going to have any fun helping my friend with her computer. If I had the time I'd save her a bunch of money and get some other brand from any store other than the one she bought from, and definitely not HP either. Unfortunately, she's going to upgrade her computer to a better CPU and I'll go back there to help her set things up on it. The only fun I'll be having is when I surreptitiously repartition the drive and put Linux on there, and when I claim my unlimited beers. The beers will deaden the pain of working with Vista (yech) and Office (yech, yech, gaaak), and HP (gaak).
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