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May 5, 2008
Adventures with Bruce - A Non-Bitter Story About the New Laptop
Bruce's new laptop arrived on Thursday evening, and he has been spending most of the past three days setting it up. I say "most" because change of any sort is extremely stressful to Bruce, so he would periodically do some programming for the NMPDR web site in order to relax. On Sunday, he suffered a BIOS failure and now he has to send the machine back to the manufacturer. As part of the repair process, all his work will be erased. At first he thought he would be able to back up the hard drives before sending the machine back, but it turns out they are not compatible with his emergency hard drive kits. This discovery caused him to go completely nuts.
The new machine was a Hewlitt-Packard HDX 9300. Visually, it's gorgeous. I can say that with confidence because The Girl thinks so, and she's the closest thing we have in this family to an arbiter of good taste. It runs Windows Vista 64. When Bruce ordered the machine, he had a vague memory of reading somewhere that something didn't work with Windows Vista 64, but all his major applications claimed to be Vista 64 compatible, so he figured it was just another memory glitch. It turned out the problem wasn't applications at all. Two of his device drivers were 32-bit only. One of them was for the Palm Centro phone, and a workaround was available. The other was the VPN program that allowed him to get inside the firewall at the lab where he works. That was a deal-breaker.
Bruce had an option. He could downgrade the machine to Vista 32. Hewlitt-Packard tech support did not recommend this. Nonetheless, he was able to get everything working but the display. Vista 32 treated the display as a generic VGA device, which meant Bruce would be unable to connect it to a projector at the office. When Bruce attempted to install the recommended Vista 32 driver, he got a message that the file was corrupt. While discussing the problem with HP tech support, they suggested he do a BIOS upgrade as a safety measure. The BIOS upgrade did something terrible and the machine will no longer turn on. This is why it has to go back.
It occurred to me during the post-mortem of this whole disaster that a lot of people would take this opportunity to complain about Hewlitt-Packard tech support for being incompetent, or rail against Microsoft for the whole idea of Windows Vista, or chastise Bruce for climbing too far out on a limb. But the truth is that the Hewlitt-Packard people were extremely understanding about Bruce's dilemma. If you want a computer that will survive for four or five years, you can't be buying the previous century's operating system. And despite his initial skepticism about Windows Vista, he claims it has an inner beauty, and now that he's seen it there is simply no going back.
So, he's disappointed, but he's not bitter. And the thing is, bitterness is expected. When a tech support person is baby-talking you through the steps of removing a battery, it's perfectly natural to get pissed off and inform them that you were getting your Ph.D. in Computer Science when they were in kindergarten. But it's also possible to sympathize with the fact that they can't see what you're doing and that makes everything ten times harder. What Bruce chose to take away from the experience is that they kept on trying to help even after he ventured into uncharted territory.
As conservatives, it is our job to be the opposite of bitter. Bitterness comes from the liberal idea that the world is perfectable, and when it's not perfect, we need to increase taxes or sue somebody so we can fix it. The truth is that we all have lame days, and we all have to make trade-offs, and the whole point of the book of Genesis is that even God can't always get what he wants.
We need a President who understands that, and we're not getting one this year. Anybody else would be pretty bitter about that.
Not us.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Mon 11:53 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Adventures with Bruce | Tags: conservative Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion humor laptops liberals Palm Centro philosophy religion technology The Girl Windows Windows Vista x64
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I'm on the cusp of ordering a new computer... to do some extreme modifications to. *heh* (It'll be the first "assembled by a company somewhere" computer here at twc central, apart from my Wonder Woman's notebook, since... oh, about 1997.) I'm torn about OS choice. In the last week, Ubuntu 8.04 has managed to impress me far beyond anything earlier iterations have, and since the "base" computer I'm considering is a 64-bit box, the 64-bit Hardy Heron is appealing.
But what to choose for the Windows OS to install in a virtual machine on top of Ubuntu? I have a completely unused 64-bit WinXPP I can install, or I could get the box with Vista installed and install Ubuntu in a VM on top of that. Frankly, I've not been impressed with Vista, but then I've not used (or worked on client machines with) Vista much since the SP1 update began rolling out. I /know/ XPP-64 is solid, has a smaller footprint, XP-SP3 promises to provide much of what /I/ would want from Vista anyway, etc., and... I could use the $100 difference between a loaded machine and one w/o an OS to beef up the capabilities of (yet) another external drive... Hmmm... Maybe when SP2 for Vista is here. *heh*
Posted by: David at May 8, 2008 9:39 PM
If the idea of the unknown raises spectres of lost productivity learning a new system, here's another word, Mac!
(Which is, of course as OSX, linux, actually).
Cheers
Posted by: Ted Doyle at May 10, 2008 8:29 AM
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