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Inconceivably bad
Apr. 12th, 2008 12:18 amBought a new laptop, a ThinkPad R61i 7650. Unfortunately, it came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I thought, oh well, I have to bite this bullet, this last death throe of a dinosaur, sooner or later. How bad can it be?
It can be unspeakably bad.
Setting up, adding RAM to bring it up to 3GB, installing software, removing pre-installed crudware, all went tolerably well. The interface is ugly, clunky, and confusing, and produces large numbers of poorly-worded dialog boxes. But this is Windows: the details are new but the essential unfriendly and stupid nature of the experience is very familiar.
Then I tried to set the administrator account to "Windows Classic" look and feel. Whirr, whirr, grind, grind, chug, chug, 45 minutes later a black screen. Ever since, booting, or waking from sleep or hiberation, is a very unreliable process and sometimes just gives me a mouse pointer on a black background.
So, hey, my software tinkering didn't take me long, let's restore to factory settings and try again. The first attempt at this took two hours and got to an endless reboot cycle with a dialog box complaining about an error on line 8 of in C:\Windows\Panther\uninstall.xml
I'm currently 2.5 hours into the second attempt.
I see that an R61i 7650 with XP, from the same retailer, is about 30% more expensive....
It can be unspeakably bad.
Setting up, adding RAM to bring it up to 3GB, installing software, removing pre-installed crudware, all went tolerably well. The interface is ugly, clunky, and confusing, and produces large numbers of poorly-worded dialog boxes. But this is Windows: the details are new but the essential unfriendly and stupid nature of the experience is very familiar.
Then I tried to set the administrator account to "Windows Classic" look and feel. Whirr, whirr, grind, grind, chug, chug, 45 minutes later a black screen. Ever since, booting, or waking from sleep or hiberation, is a very unreliable process and sometimes just gives me a mouse pointer on a black background.
So, hey, my software tinkering didn't take me long, let's restore to factory settings and try again. The first attempt at this took two hours and got to an endless reboot cycle with a dialog box complaining about an error on line 8 of in C:\Windows\Panther\uninstall.xml
I'm currently 2.5 hours into the second attempt.
I see that an R61i 7650 with XP, from the same retailer, is about 30% more expensive....
