Craplets and new PCs
Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal shares his insights into setting up a new PC in his column: Personal Technology — Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal
I, too, have been struggling with a new PC, this one from Dell. It is a brand new laptop, graciously sent to me by my work (even though I asked for a new Macbook Pro that had more memory, faster CPU, bigger hard drive AND a smaller price tag). Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like to complain when someone sends me a new computer that is supposed to make my job easier, but this is hardly the case. To date, I hardly use it because it only came with 1 GB of memory (there was a mixup somewhere in the ordering process). One gig of memory just isn’t enough for serious development work. More memory is on the way, so I figured I could at least get things setup so it would be ready to use. Ha, fat chance. I soon realized that anti-virus software wasn’t installed and god knows you can’t have a PC without that. So, IT services sent me a disk for AV software, which promptly hard-killed the computer on EVERY SINGLE boot up with annoying messages about memory that can’t be written. Google searches for the error messages revealed little. Finally, our IT person tracked down the issue on Mcafee’s web site, but not before I had to do 5, yes 5, system restores to try out various other solutions. As I have said before, I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to hard boot my G4 in the 4 years I have owned it. I have done that at least twice as much in the past two weeks on my brand new Dell. Ugh.
I just don’t get why corporate America continues to waste the money it does on IT departments when they could invest in UNIX based systems like Apple that just work and provide a rich user experience. Could it be that the ones in charge of making the decisions about what to buy are at risk of losing there jobs because they would have far less to deal with on a daily basis? Seriously, if you could own a BMW (and I don’t mean the 3 class) for about the same price as a Kia, which would you pick?
