Letting the dust settle
It has been an extremely busy couple of days.
On Monday I had to bring Herself into hospital. It was a simple enough procedure – a couple of injections in her back and that’s that.
Except that it wasn’t that straightforward.
We arrived on time, but then had to sit for a while in the waiting area. Eventually we were called and I wheeled Herself into the day ward, hefted her onto the bed whereupon she was attached by a large bundle of wires to a couple of computers. They seemed to think she was in a fit state for the procedures and left us to wait to be called. We waited. And waited. And waited.
After about an hour and a half they arrived to collect her, and told me to come back in a couple of hours.
I buggered off to the computer shop.
I found the machine I was looking for. It was a little HP thingy with a reasonable price and reasonably powerful though it had a smaller screen that Herself is used to. The assistant then started to attempt to sell me Microsoft upgrades to all the trial versions on the machine. I told him that my first action would be to wipe the hard disk and put on Linux, and that I didn’t need any upgrades to Office or Antivirus or any of that shit. “But that will invalidate the warranty” he exclaimed. “You can’t do that.” So I pointed out that the warranty should apply to the hardware and not the software but it seems that isn’t the case. He all but refused to sell me the buggering machine. I don’t think he was used to dealing with OAPs who actually knew how to switch on a computer.
Eventually he calmed down and agreed to sell it to me. The compromise was that he slipped in a wee USB stick to restore the machine, so if something goes wrong I can restore the yoke to its pristine condition before returning it.
I got home to a wildly excited dog [the cat didn’t give a shit at my absence]. I just had time to make a cuppa when the hospital phoned and said Herself was ready for collection. So off I went again, much to the dog’s horror and drove all the way back to Dublin to collect her.
Yesterday I unpacked my new purchase. I plugged it in and switched on. It fired up after an age and there in all its tacky glory was Windows 10. Fuck me but it’s a horrible looking screen. Just about everything on it required a subscription or a licence, from games, through antivirus to fucking Netflix. Netflix is integrated by default? Fuck that.
It took a bit of fiddling but I booted up from a Linux USB stick. Grand. First job – grab about 800Gb of hard disk from Windows. The latter just doesn’t deserve a Terrabyte of disk. I left just about enough space to restore the machine in case of emergencies.
Having installed Mint I came across a weird problem. Wireless had worked perfectly in Windows, but according to Linux there wasn’t even a wireless facility on the machine. Fuck! My first ever failure with Mint.
It took me several hours but eventually I found a solution. It worked.
I then installed another copy of Linux on the same machine, so now there is one for Herself and one for me. I could have just put the one copy and installed two users I know, but I have my reasons.
All I have to do now is to discover how to solve a small but weird screen flicker that occurs intermittently. Apparently Hewlett Packard don’t like Linux.
I am hoping today will revert to normality.
It’s bit cheeky that the warranty needs the original os.And – Windows is the future
I got the impression that HP have some special deal with Micro$oft. I had one of their machines before [in the dark days before I discovered Linux] and had no problems with it so I assumed that it would be fine. Having deflated Windows into a dark corner of the hard disk and having fixed the wireless it is working extremely well. Herself is over the moon with it, which I suppose is the whole point.
Even so, if your cooler or something packs in, you expect it to be replaced under warranty, regardless of what software you have.
HP computers are shit on a shingle. I remember trying to get rid of the bloatware on HP’s and not being able to because they were part of the Windoze OS and the OS would not work if you deleted the bloatware. I once had a laptop by HP that gave me an error message when I tried to remove Norton anti-virus that Windoze wouldn’t work if I removed it. I researched this and found out that one could not install McAfee on HP computers because of licensing. Because of all the problems I have had with HP’s in the past I would never buy one.
What struck me [as I mentioned] was the sheer volume of crap on the front menu which was useless unless I paid extra. It works on the assumption that all we want to do is watch Netflix, play stupid games or sort out selfies.
One thing that amused me was that nearly all the laptops now come with no CD drives. I was tempted to ask about a machine with a floppy drive just to see if he knew what it was……
What was the problem with the WIFI ? We need details inorder to be able to poke fun at you properly!
Poke fun all you like. Water of a duck’s thingy. Linux just refused to acknowledge that wifi existed on the board. I might as well have asked it to search for a herd of elephants.
You could have burned all the Microsoft stuff onto a disk and tied a ribbon around it and given it to Herself telling her it was software worth hundreds of Euro.(I would check with the trading standards officer about the legality of the suggestion that hardware must use particular software – it sounds the sort of spin that Curry’s-PC World used to talk).
I’m sure Herself would have loved that as a present.
As far as I [andI’m sure the law] am concerned, the warranty applies to the hardware. How could anyone apply a warranty to anything Microsoft produces? If anything did go wrong with the machine I wouldn’t hesitate to bring it back and would happily go to the Ombudsman if necessary.
P.S. It was PC World!
They are still up to their tricks, then. Bock used to have a blog post called, “PC World sold me a piece of shit.”
http://bocktherobber.com/2008/02/pc-world-sold-me-a-piece-of-shit/
Hah! I remember reading that at the time.
I have bought quite a few items off them in the past without any problems. There was only one device I ever had to bring back [on the advice of the device manufacturer who had been trying to fix it remotely and failed]. PC World replaced it without question.