Laptop Down: (Warning: this is well over to the geeky side of the spectrum.) Ever since the days when DOS was king and config.sys was the Swiss army knife of computer control, I have been getting more and more separated from what is actually going on in my computer. The hard disk fires up and cranks away at random intervals with no clue as to why except the cryptic "system idle processes" in Task Manager. Hewlett-Packard pre-loads and ungodly amount of useless crap on the machine, most of which I have no use for whatsoever -- 93 different CD rippers, 420 DVD players, 847 game demos, etc.; at best it just sits there taking up space, at worst it's waiting to get hijacked to be used as a spam zombie for some greasy dirtbag in the Upper Slobovian mafia.
Most annoyingly, I'll be barreling away in Word, writing some gloriously poetic passage, when suddenly my cursor will turn into a circle and everything will grind to a halt so a little box can pop up to remind me that I can make really great home movies using HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0, just click here to start! Pissed off, I then go on a hunt to uninstall HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0 only to discover the HyperSuperCinemaEditor is listed in Control Panel under its company name of FlyByNight Software Inc., which has about six entrees in Control Panel and there is no telling which one is HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0 or whether I use any other products of theirs.
But it doesn't matter because my cursor is commandeered again as it seems there is a new Java Virtual Machine update that needs to be installed right away or else the internet might disintegrate before my very eyes, oh and by default it will also give you the Yahoo Toolbar because no one in their right mind would want the latest version of Java and not have the Yahoo Toolbar, silly.
But before that gets sorted out, HP wants me to know that it's time for me to check their site for any updated drivers, as it has done every couple of days for the past year, only once actually finding a driver that needs to be updated, which it seems they should know because it's their own website they are checking. Better I spend an hour or so trying to bring my laptop into conformity rather than complete my work, because of what value is art, science, commerce or any human accomplishment if your laptop isn't totally compliant?
Yes, we are so much more efficient now without that arcane config.sys file to edit.
I blame two groups of people for this: Hackers and Grandma. Hackers because they are the ones so anxious to steal your machine for fun or profit that there are constant security updates that need attention. Grandma because we all know that grandma needs to be told about everything she might want to do and hand led by little word balloons to do it. Arguably, Grandma is the bigger issue because if Grandma wouldn't do silly things like click on unverified email attachments we'd probably need less security. In all my years (at least 15) of using Windows I think I've gotten a virus exactly once and it did no damage whatsoever, and this is including Windows 98 and early XP which were known to be the playthings of every malicious, acne-scarred teenager who could write a PERL script. But in the interest of supporting the least common denominator, we all get to be treated like grandma.
Actually I also blame HP, and other PC makers for their idiotic habit of preloading all sorts of el cheapo applications and making you go hunting through the innards of the system to convince them that you really don't want them or need to be reminded that they exist.
Microsoft bears some of the blame also. I am a big fan of their applications. I couldn't live without Word. I'm getting attached to OneNote. Outlook is pretty damn useful. At my day job we use Visual Studio which is peerless. But let's face it; the operating systems have been hit or miss. I thought highly of Windows 2000. Windows XP started out awful, and ended pretty great. Vista, though not as bad as it's made out to be, can't really be called a success. For example, Vista broke my laptop.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I may have been one of the only people who hadn't had a complaint about Vista. Actually, I have had complaints but nothing debilitating. But then things started going bad. Specifically, coming out of hibernation or after a boot up the thing would just freeze on a blank screen. I would have to hard reset to get it going. It was sporadic at first. Then it started happening regularly. Then it sometimes took two or three hard resets to get it going. I could bring it to the local coffee house and I would be through two grande chai teas before I got to my logon screen.
There was no determining the cause. I ran all the diagnostics I could find and detected no problems. Then the last straw came. My backup process started failing. It would just stop dead and report a cryptic "catastrophic error". What's worse, every time I tried to reboot, the bios would detect some issue and immediately throw me into chkdsk which would itself freeze up good and tight when verifying indexes. (Although strangely, if I terminated the chkdsk it would eventually boot up without a problem.) I immediately suspected my hard disk was failing or about to fail.
Now, back in the old days, I would have handled this in an afternoon. First, since I had my data backed up, I would have reinstalled DOS. If that didn't work, I would have re-formatted the disk and then reinstalled DOS. Follow either with xcopying back my handful of applications and then my data and I'd be golden. If that didn't work, I knew it was time to invest in a new hard disk. Annoying, but at least I was in control.
Maybe if I was still keeping up on things I would have known how to do the equivalent in today's world. I have since discovered the contemporary version is to do a clean install of Windows from the HP recovery disks (provided you can find them), restore your latest backup indicating not to overwrite any existing files (the ones you just generated from the clean install). But I didn't know that. I don't understand how my computer works anymore. I don't have the file dependencies in my head. I don't know what will work with what. And I certainly don't know where everything needs to go in the folder structure. I can't even say for sure that my backups are actually of use since the software decides how to store and format the data. Why would I know such things? Everything came preconfigured and structured precisely so that it would work and in such a way that it could not be pirated by executing a simple copy command. Computers don't exist to be controlled by their users anymore.
Besides, I thought surely it was a hardware problem. Wrong. $200 to the local PC guru got me wise -- it wasn't hardware after all. That Vista managed to break my laptop to the point where chkdsk would not run amazes me. Just one more entry in the litany of things that my leftover '90s era geekiness cannot fathom. Nearly the price of a new netbook and a weekend of downloading and reconfiguring to get it all back to where it was. Maybe it would have been smarter to pitch the laptop and buy a fresh one instead. I swear, not a day goes by when I don't get a reminder that it is simply not my world anymore.
Three things need to be done to rectify this situation.
1) Vista has to be fixed, which by all accounts Microsoft is making great strides towards doing with Windows 7
2) PC makers have to stop pre-loading applications. Just stop. Or at least give us the option of a clean Windows install. Or provide the Windows OEM disks so we can wipe the thing and do our own clean install as soon as we get home. Or something. You can't imagine how depressed I was when I got my laptop back in functioning order only to discover all the crap I had managed to clean out over the past year reappeared with the fresh install.
3) We need a unified update utility. In other words all downloadable updates are handled through a single utility. You set the utility how you want (background installations vs. notifications of availability; pop up warnings vs. passive monitoring) and every program adheres to it. MS could build something like this, but enforcement might be difficult.
I'm sure some hipster-doofus out there is laughing at yelling "get a Mac." Well, Mr. hipster-doofus, I did have a Mac, and if you had been following my posts over the years instead of twittering your facebook, or whatever the hell it is you slouchers do, you would recall that my Mac didn't just cause me temporary grief, it ceased to function completely and forever, not long after the warranty was up.
The true blue geeks out there are suggesting I try Linux, which might actually be closer to the old total control days of DOS...if I had the time to learn Linux. I don't believe I have that much time left on this planet. And if I did, would not want to spend it learning an operating system.
Besides, I really don't want control over my PC. What I want is to not NEED control over my PC. I want the thing to be an appliance, a washing machine. But a washing machine that doesn't set off an alarm and make me press a button to initiate the spin cycle. Or doesn't pause my DVD to tell me about its wonderful new setting for delicates. How bloody hard can that be? Does Kenmore make laptops?
