I went to get a new bank account set up and began talking with the accounts person. She related how awful an experience she underwent with an HP laptop. I could relate as I have an HP about the same age. We both found our new Vista laptops to be unbelievably slow.
Slow doesn’t begin to describe the behavior of this lemon. Being a consultant I ultimately got it resolved but being a Mac consultant it took me awhile to get there.
Basically, I ordered the recovery CD from HP as I had already zapped the recovery partition in an attempt to put Linux on the box. I repartitioned the drive into three volumes and restored the Vista install onto one of them, turning off a great deal of HP installation junk as I went along.
Incredibly enough, HP’s own recovery CD was buggy and it took me several attempts to get the installation finished. Vista was still glacial, so I ended up installing Ubuntu Linux into one of the other volumes and happily used the machine for some months.
Finally, I thought there must be a solution to this madness, did some googling on ‘vista speedup’, and turned off a number of system services that finally gave me a somewhat lifelike Vista laptop. It only took two service pack installations for the HP webcam to start working.
The account rep’s experience was a little more direct. She simply stopped using the machine and got an iPhone. It serves all her needs including web browsing. She figured that since she didn’t buy a separate Internet connection for $50/month, the iPhone was affordable for her.
What I found interesting was how the iPhone for many is becoming their laptop of choice. Why carry one around when all you want to do is check your email, listen to music and perhaps surf a few pages. Doesn’t hurt to be able to watch a video or add a cool game or other application too.
I guess iPhones rock. Somehow I’m not there yet, though I’d like to have one for a week just to check it thoroughly.
