Monday Rant

I have not written for a very long while. I am such the procrastinator. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to write again but here we are in the middle of April and so far, not a word.

To get myself back into the swing of things, I am going to use Monday (we all love Monday’s, right?) . . I am going to use Monday to be my ‘rant against the world’ day. I hate being a negative person but the older I get, the more I realize that the older people have a right to be angry.

Today I had to flip a coin between writing about Microsoft or people that do not use their blinkers when they drive. Then there was the moron that got off a bus and did not bother to look before walking across five lanes of highway into morning rush hour traffic. I was going to honk my horn at him but he had ear buds jammed way inside his ears and was tuned out of this world. So let me get out a quarter . . . and flip . . . heads its Microsoft rant and tails it is the blinker people . . . (flip) . . . heads it is . .

Microsoft. The company some people love to hate. Before I start, I need to tell you, I am a named brand kind of guy. I realize some big companies whore themselves out after awhile, but I have usually been more successful paying a little more for named brand quality upfront then the aggravation I have suffered because I tried to save a few bucks using the “other” brand. So it should come to no surprise, when it comes to PC’s, I am a big HP/Intel/MS kind of person. I really do want these companies to be successful and hope they are because they have quality products at a fair market price.

So where do I begin? Well, a year or so ago I purchased a brand new HP laptop with MS Vista. I did get a very good deal on it (clearance sale) so I did accept the AMD processor. I have had this laptop going night and day for over a year and have had very few problems. In fact, I would say they are more of an inconvenience more than a problem and most of the inconvenience has been limited to MS Internet Explorer 7.0. What this means to my rant, I have NOT been on my HP desktop at home for the last year which means it has been open and available to my wife and kids.

Now I do use the home office PC for two main things. I-tunes (another upcoming rant) and MS Money (no need to have all of THAT private information on a laptop). So last month I went to pay some bills and balance out statements when I noticed the HP Media Center was “noisy”. Perhaps I had not used it in a while or perhaps it was late at night and the noise just seemed louder.

No, I checked and the processor was running at 30-40% with NO APPLICATIONS running. I checked the Process Monitor and there was nothing running and the PC indicated IDLE 99% of the time. I thought this to be very strange. I ran a series of on line diagnostics and nothing was found. I was reading on line about memory leakage and other technical stuff I did not understand and figured there was probably just too much stuff on the hard drive so I decided to upgrade the home PC. I use to build my own PC’s so I figured an upgrade would be a piece of cake. I purchased a new hard drive (320G nearly doubled my storage) and RAM (removed two (2) 512M sticks and installed four (4) 1G sticks).

My one rant against HP, they save $5 by not providing OEM OS disks and instead allocate a large portion of the hard drive to store the OS should it be necessary to do so. This is like your ISP telling you that you can use their on line technical support when you do not have an internet connection. Do I have a right to be angry at the absurdity of this nonsense? (more tomorrow . . . see, this was not so hard after all).