blog.LucasQualls.com

Alright. So after uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes twice and having to do a full restore of my iPod three times, I can say that Vista and iTunes DO NOT get along very well. Right now as I type this, the iPod is running the restore process for the third time. If it doesn’t work this time, I’m going to scream.

I want to put XP on this machine, but I checked HP’s website, and there are no XP drivers for this machine.

Damn it! Gah! Blah! Bah! and other exclamations!

I bought a laptop from Circuit City. It’s an HP, and it came pre-loaded with a crapload (yes, that is the technical term) of shitty software. Lets see, what do we have here. A 60 day trial of microsoft office 2007 home and student edition: uninstalled. I got the full enterprise version from ASU for free for the win. What else? HP Help and Support. HP Internet and Digital Services. Link to eBay on the desktop. Trial version of muvee something or other. All kinds of crap that I really don’t want. And to top it all off, its on Windows Vista Home Premium. I want my XP back please.

We’ve got some “free” games on here. However, upon further inspection, it becomes apparent that these are wild tangent games which have one free trial session. After that, you have to buy these things called “wild coins” which are the online equivalent of a quarter. In fact, each “wild coin” costs $0.25 but they are only sold in packs of like $10 worth or $20 worth. Of course, what they want you to do is buy the subscription for like $7.99 a month which gets you so many of these coins per month. I’m probably going to totally uninstall all of that crap.

I suppose the whole idea is to get a system like this for a little over $700 you have to expect these things on there. These “bloatware,” “trialware,” or “crapware” as it has became known on the internet is what subsidizes the cost of these systems. But it doesn’t make me want to get rid of it all any less.

What really bothers me, however, is I looked up Vongo which is preinstalled. Apparently it is a movie downloading service or something from Starz and anyone who has had this preinstalled on their HP laptop has had no success uninstalling it. Running the normal uninstall causes an error and apparently this error returns on every reboot. I decided to just leave it installed and never use it. That sucks cuz that’s just that much less hard drive space I have to work with.

I will report more on this as I know more.

Alright, so Windows Live Writer is actually pretty awesome. You set up your blog address and user name and password and it pulls in your theme and lets you set up a post as it will look when published. I’m not sure about other blog systems, but it works perfectly with WordPress. Of course, WordPress seems to be the number one most awesome blog software. So if you aren’t using wordpress, get it now. Get rid of that other crap. Anyway…

So lets see what else I can do with this program…

I’m having horrible issues with my damn walmart.com laptop order. They aparently had a problem with my debit card processing the payment. I assume so, considering an $800 purchase is a little more than I usually use it for. I use my debit card for 99% of the purchases I make in my life, so the average purchase is $5-10. I’m going to call customer service here in a few minutes and see if I can get the damn thing canceled and just buy one in store. Damn them. Damn them all.

More to come soon.