I hate my laptop. No. Let me rephrase. I loathe and despise it.
So much so, I cuss out the little f*cker every day.
Do you know, laptop, what a piece of steaming poo you are? You don’t? Well, I’m here to say poo you are. Nay, not just poo, laptop, but steaming poo. Laptop. Yes, I’m talking to you. I rue the day we met. Further, laptop, I regret your very existence. Yes Laptop. You. Quit your crying, you little baby. Do you want go into the closet again? I thought not, laptop.
Close the laptop. Put it in your bag. Come back to it a few hours or a day later. An alert: “hibernation failed” [OK][Cancel]. Click OK. You get another alert. “Plug in power immediately! You’re battery is dead you dumb user!” Black screen. Reboot. Disk churn. Churn. Screen flashes. Crash.
Track pad. Extra features like scrolling on one side just cause flashing and beeping freakouts. Uninstalled driver leaves only the worst trackpad known to mankind. This is the one the engineer designed and said to his management “here’s the prototype, it doesn’t work for shit, but you get the idea.” Of course his managers were high fiving and shouting “Ship it!” at the top of their lungs. This is why I carry a mouse with me everywhere I bring Mr. Crashy McCrasher.
Wireless. Hah. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Crash.
Crapware? Oh, we got it. Machine running too fast? Your applications too stable? Do you need to be interrupted with ui that looks like it was designed by Skippy the ninth grade AV club president? Then have no fear we have more Crapware than you can stake a bluetooth enabled stick at. And don’t worry, once it’s installed you can’t get rid of it (it’s a particularly nastly type of Venereal Disease for computers) and your machine is never as stable as it was, no matter if you uninstall or not. Do I really need the driver for drag and drop DVD writing (wtf does this even mean)? Or the software that goes “ping”? Or software that runs around like a little kid screaming look at me! look at me! I pooed my diaper! Pay attention! I don’t care if you’re writing an important email!
Yes, I’m talking about the Toshiba Tecra M2. Incidentally, looking around for a link to info about it, I saw only favorable reviews. Here’s the thing. Laptop reviewers? On crack. Yes. See they’re used to such craptacular laptops that this worthless hodgepodge of crappy parts and incompatable software passes for a good laptop. God that’s just pathetically sad. Try using a Mac Powerbook for ten minutes. Now that’s a great laptop. I’m talking hardware here folks. Also, does Apple install all of Skippy’s shareware projects and software experiments? No. Toshiba, Dell, Gateway, all you dumbasses should take a lesson from this. Apple strives for a unified and positive user experience, not a many bulleted list of “features” put together by marketing folks who think mass mailings and popup ads are a good idea. Oh, the humanity!
No more Toshibas for me. Ever. And that, my friend, is my solemn promise to you. To me. To Toshiba. To all you purveyors of Crapware infested pooboxes. Yes, and to you, laptop, you little poo-top. You little lap-poo.
Fujitsu makes good laptops. At least the ones I’ve seen. Nice hardware. A minimum of installed Crapware. Maybe one of the future Apple Intel based Powerbooks so I can run Vista on it.
OK, I’m done bitching now. I better go reboot my laptop again. It just crashed, drained its battery, and corrupted all magnetic media within a two mile radius. There’s a smoking crater on my desktop. Know what I did to cause this? I took it out of my bag, opened it, and plugged it into its dock.
It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t have any of the following in my office at work. Sledgehammer. Chainsaw. Acid blood from one of Ripley’s Aliens. A family of pissed off Orangutans hopped up on PCP. A scud missile. A two year old boy with a big gulp of Mountain Dew and fist full of pixie sticks. A grumpy camel.
Yes. A grumpy camel. God help you, laptop, if I had a grumpy camel. Yes, I’m talking to you. Quit your blubbering. I’ll give you something to blubber about. Come back here. Don’t run from me. You’re only making it worse. Don’t make me get out the Orangutans. Laptop, you sicken me.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
The first thing I do when I get a laptop or PC from a traditional vendor (eg, Dell) is reformat it and do a clean install of Windows.
I’m sorry the PC vendors are so retarded.
I’m sure you can envision a world where only Microsoft was allowed to put stuff on shipping PCs. It would be Apple-esque. But it’d also violate two billion anti-trust laws. I think.
Wait till you try the Tecra M4. It’s a steaming pile of crap on top of a stinking pile of crap.
I was hoping for Vista Beta 2 but I can’t stand it anymore. Time to repave this dog.
I agree with you 100%, however it isn’t the hardware’s fault, well maybe in the Tecra case it is. I support several hundred Protege M200 and once you completely obliterate the Toshiba image and start over again things much improve. It is just the people who build the images on these things are paid to put all that crap on there, they can’t refuse a penny it seems.
Jeff, actually I envision the *manafacturer* of the laptop preflighting what’s installed on the laptop and really installing only what’s in the user’s best interest. I don’t think Microsoft makes the only software worth installing on said laptop.
Just wanted to make that clear.
-Mike
"Laptop" is so impersonal. Don’t you PC users name your computers, like Mac users do?
I think it’s a laptop problem. I clean install every single time, and I’ve clean installed my current laptop probably 6 times. It’s a 1 year old D3ll. My last one was a Compaq Armada, which was just as bad. Just bad in a different way. It was the only laptop I have EVER used that would turn off when the power went out regardless of the battery left.
I got my Dell 9300 a few months ago (Media Center) and it eventually ground to a near halt. So I tried the Iolo Sytem Mechanic and it seemed to work very well. I was able to remove a lot of the crappy, worthless startup ware that they put in the tray but cannot remove in a default install. I would have gone for the clean install but I baught my Dell as a refurb (I got a bargin) and it only came with the ‘restore cd’. I hate those damn things. I could go to a XP SP2 Pro install, but why bother. It works well most of the time. And with system mechanic – which you can set to ‘low’ for background activity – oh man, when a background task get’s going and takes away responsiveness I get to frustrated. I lecture the laptop – ‘You are mine. You will do what I say or I will reboot you.’ I don’t dare destroy the hardware but the digits on the hard drive are on perpetual probation. I nuke the hard drive with Windows Vista and start over.