Current mood:	teeth-grinding
Entry tags:	computer vista rant

cthulhu ate my computer.
Well, I thought I'd have time these next 3 weeks to finish all the art projects that fell behind while I was working on school stuff. But I have to delay those things once again due to computer problems.

Let me count the evils that are computer problems.

1. Vista.
This is the most ingenious piece of shit that Windows has ever come up with. They make more money off people flailing around and tearing their hair out than they ever have before. Not only that, but they've taken away control of the computer from the user, and have given control to the computer itself. Don't think that just because it's a machine, it will obey you. Oh no. Vista creates life by giving the computer a mind of its own, and making it nearly impossible for any user's grubby fingers to circumvent what the computer really wants. World domination will soon follow. The Matrix? Vista is the spark of weirdness that will short-circuit that into happening.

2. Vista.
Even after I turn off all the programs that supposedly makes Windows Vista better, faster, stronger -- these include Windows Defender, User Account Controls, Windows Firewall, Windows Automatic Update, and many other barricades to protect you from yourself -- it still finds ways to glitch. One of the most random ones I've found is that it schedules backups of itself -- it will create System Restore points without you ever having to do anything, including stopping whatever programs you were running, or giving it permission. That might be well and good, except it likes to use up 100% of the computer's performance capacity to create these restore points -- so any program you were using is suddenly and inexplicably frozen for 20 minutes. If you're like most users, you flail around, press ctrl + alt + del a bunch, bash your head into walls, and restart your computer the old-fashioned way before the System Restore point ever has a chance to be created, because it wasn't nice enough to tell you what it was doing. Fun, right? The kicker is that if you ever need to use these restore points, and go into System Restore, it only shows you the most recent 2 restore points. There is no way to access the other restore points, even though Windows Help likes to assure you that "Yes indeed you can choose from a list of restore points, and they're saved until your computer has no more space to save them!" So if you encountered a problem that started at 6 am Tuesday, and the computer's last two restore points are Wednesday and Thursday (because it likes to create these points every day), suddenly you can't restore back far enough to fix the problem. And most people don't diagnose a problem until it's computer-life-threatening -- they piddle around thinking it will fix itself until it interferes with their activities enough. So screw you pal, you're stuck with that problem now. Even restoring back to that earliest restore point doesn't give you access to the restore points that would have been listed on that day. Oh no. You can either restore to a later date, or undo the restore. The only option at this point is to stuff in the installation CD and pray it can repair the problem... but the Vista installation CD's idea of repairing a problem is to completely reformat your hard drive! :D

3. Did I mention Vista?
Vista doesn't work with some wireless networks. Windows Firewall and Defender are lovely devices that block all potentially harmful signals that come to your computer -- which includes the internet itself, because dammit, that's harmful stuff. It isn't compatible with your hardware, such as fax machines, scanners, printers, or anything else. If you try to install these devices, Windows Vista will glitch, and the Vista user returns to a state of flailing. It doesn't work with 3d Max, unless you turn off the color scheme. WTF is so different about the Vista color scheme that requires you to turn it off when you want to run certain programs? It doesn't look any different from one scheme to the other, that I can see. So what was the point of creating the new color scheme in the first place?

4. MAC addresses.
For some reason, I suppose because I was using a static IP address instead of roaming for about 2 years, the downtown network where I work decided to temporarily ban my MAC address. This isn't as fixable as the IP address. It means I can't access the internet while I'm at work anymore unless I use my external card, which is a 20$ POS that likes to randomly shut itself off while I'm working. It also doesn't like me working it too hard, which means I can either chat with people on trillian, or look at one website. No, I can't refresh that website. I can't even click links on that website. But it will let me look at one website without crashing. "Ooh, what a pretty website.. I wish I could click things."


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My computer, at the moment, is having a hard drive issue I believe. It'll get over itself in the next couple days, or I can install this other hard drive I had laying around for some reason, but that means 2-3 days without a laptop. Roland's computer (where I currently am) has no Photoshop, nor does it have the driver for my wacom tablet, nor is it portable so that I could take it to work. So I have no other option really than to twiddle my thumbs and wait either for the geek squad to tell me "Yup. That thar's a hard drive problem." Or for my new laptop to arrive in the mail. It's anyone's guess which will happen first.