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Red Hat Diaries/0003

Premises

So basically what we're looking at is this.

  1. The US is the country of the Great All-American Rip-Off.
  2. You can get a great discount if you buy online, but then you buy sight unseen and they take your money first and refuse to answer questions afterwards.
  3. Almost all hardware manufacturers are producing shittier and shittier products.
  4. For most people the purchase of significant computer hardware is the third largest investment they will make in their lives, but computers don't last like Volvos. They're made deliberately obsolescent by the wizards in Redmond and other places.
  5. As the quality of hardware itself goes down the drain, so does the quality of customer service and support.
  6. Windows XP wants product activation, and Bill Gates is free at any time to sit on his product activation and rotate.
  7. HP Pavilions suck. Compaq Presarios suck. The hinges get bad and the casing cracks.
  8. HP Omnibooks - at least the old ones - are more durable, but they're always dimensioned with yesterday's news.
  9. Dell laptops bite bigger than anyone else's. The cheapness of the hardware product, the casing, etc. cannot be overstated.
  10. Laptops are sensitive in a way that stationarys are not. If you spill a coke in your stationary's keyboard, you ruin the keyboard. If you do the same thing with your laptop, you burn out the motherboard and it will cost you a pretty penny (US$1000 or more) to replace it - halfway to a new notebook purchase.
  11. The magnificent looking Apple PowerBook G4 is more like a washbasin than a computer. Sexy yes - but about as durable as an onion skin. If you drop it as little as four inches it will crumple up. If you wear a ring as you type you will scratch it indelibly. Your normal finger sweat will smudge it indelibly. Magnificent in pictures only, in real life it is anything but the Nikon F1 housing you need.
  12. The (old) iMac is simply underdimensioned. It won't run OSX fast enough.
  13. The (new) iBook still looks and feels like a kiddies toy.
  14. The G4 PowerMac is very very noisy.
  15. You can get stationarys that will run XP for a song - US$500 or less, not counting the monitor - and they're probably as dependable as anything else out there.
  16. The notebook is handy all right, but it is still the province of the suits who think having a cellular phone makes them creative.
  17. The major suppliers can take your money without your approval and you will never get it back. Give them your credit card number and you're an idiot. The intelligence level of the people working for these suppliers (Dell, Gateway et al.) is lower than you think - and you are admittedly already thinking very low indeed.
  18. Store personnel - Gateway Country, Circuit City, blah blah blah blah - don't know shit. One rep for Gateway insisted Windows XP won't run NTFS. Upon further questioning she admitted she didn't know what NTFS is.
  19. Store personnel are not properly educated or supervised. At one Gateway Country the personnel were unable to play a DVD disk on any machine in the store - think about it. They didn't have a lot to do, they were a nicely number in the store, there were no customers to speak of all that weekend - but they hadn't even checked to see their showroom models actually worked. And toss the coin again and what you've got is such a deplorable hardware/systemware situation that one of the key features screws up at first testing.

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