Vista Rant

My long suffering Sony Vaio gave up ghost a few months ago and I found myself back in the market for a low-end laptop. Everything has become a lot cheaper than it was five years ago when I had bought the Sony. That was the good news. There is plenty of bad news to compensate for it. For the money I was saving, I would saddled with Windows Vista - an abomination in the name of OS for which a couple of gig of RAM is not nearly good enough.

Like many others, I hate this thing with a passion and wish the Mac was cheaper so I could fit one in my low-end budget. When all I want to do with my laptop is check email, use the internet save pictures and documents, I wonder why I would need so much horsepower in my computer and still have it work so slow with this Vista thing running on it. This is just not right.

Now, to add insult to injury the sales dude at the store advised that I should pay their tech to optimize the software for me so it does not slow down to crawl pace. Apparently an "unoptimized" machine with Vista running on it would grind to a halt in short order. While this clearly begs the question why ship this garbage out in the first place, the answers are not quite forthcoming. The sales guy explained to me patiently (yet again) that XP was not an option and yes I would have to pay extra to set my brand new machine right unless I wanted to muck around with all kinds of registry settings and deal with the consequences.

If this is not a horrible customer experience, I don't know what is. First force a crappy piece of software down the customer's gullet and then have them pay to make it suck just a little less. The only reason I am still a Mac holdout is the price. There is a market full of folks like me who are begging for an alternative to the PC-Vista stranglehold only we don't have a big budget. Are we on anyone's radar at all ? Somewhat unrelated to this rant, read a nice feature in Low-tech Magazine on computing without electricity.