So some of you may remember my post on "How to Shaft Corporate America""-ironically a post about Circuit City which is now out of commission.
In the post I detailed how I basically got 2, I repeat, two, free lap tops from Circuit City.
The first time was not related to anything I directly did. Lightning fried the mother board, and they replaced it (they might as well have replaced the entire lap top). The second time around it was intentional.
My "accidental damage" extended warranty-that I got super cheap while working there in high school- was about to expire. I backed up everything on my laptop to an external hard drive, then proceeded to throw my lap top down a long flight of stairs-4 or 5 times- and then poured half a gallon of water on it.
A few weeks later I had a gift card for nearly $1,000 to Circuit City-only ~$100 short of what I paid for the laptop new (with warranty) 2 years prior.
I rationalized this away with hundreds of hours of hard work for around 8 bucks an hour-while they made $100+ on most of my hours worked. Makes me wonder how the hell they went out of business while Sears-averaging only $60 per hour/electronics employee- is still around doing business.
Anyways...when I bought a new laptop, I made sure to pick one out with the exact specs I wanted so it would last longer than 2 years.
I made out good...or so I thought.
The laptop I have is good, the hardware that is. The main problem for the past ~year seems to be the operating system, the dreaded Windows Vista.
Get this- every few months I've had to do a complete system recovery due to Vista crapping out. This is a multi-hour ordeal that's an absolute pain in the ass.
Leading up to the crash, my laptop would gradually slow down-especially FireFox.
Recently, I became fed up with this repeat pattern of events. I decided to take action and switch my operating system to a stripped down-and better performing- version of Windows XP (/w latest updates and service packs).
While I'm not completely horrible with computers, installing an entirely new operating system-a hacked one at that- was new completely new territory. Oh well, might as well dive in head first.
I phoned a friend, asked a few simple questions, and got to work. Started out by backing everything up onto an external hard drive, and then went from there.
Once I got Windows XP up and running-took a few tries- things seemed to be going smoothly. Mission accomplished...right?
Wrong. My laptop came pre-installed with Vista, and the graphics card was made for Vista only as well. Meaning there are no easy to find drivers for the card running on Windows XP (even though the card is perfectly capable of running on XP), none from the manufactuerer of course.
So what did this mean?
It meant the computer ran great on the newly installed XP, but every time I had to scroll down a page, it took 10 times as long as normal, and scrolled in frames. Incredibly slow and annoying.
Long story short, it took a few hours to track down and learn how to install the appropaite driver. Thank god for google.
After that I tracked down other drivers, wasn't too hard.
On the plus side I learned a lot about my computer, and how to work around dozens of different problems. Also, the drivers I downloaded were the latest, and gave me new options for both the sound and grahpics card.
In the end, my laptop is hauling ass with a clean version of XP (free of all that garbage Microsoft loads onto it). There's no comparsion, Vista just sucks on every level.
I also went on an open source software spree. A few items worth checking out for those not in the loop...
Open Office- 99% the same as Microsoft Office, less bugs, and oh yeah, it's 100% free.
AVG Anti-Virus- one of the best free anti-virus/anti-spyware tools.
VLC Media Player- a favorite of mine for a long while, an easy to use, simple, and AWESOME media player.
FireFox- the web browser that murders Internet Explorer.
Paint.net- a kick ass version of paint, free.
-Dream
