IP: A bad day at the computer room

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

It has been a bad day. First:

As sent to Mike Dell

> The purchase of my 8100 series process was very pleasant till I started 
> the system under Windows ME and found myself locked into a version of IE 5 
> that was customized for Dell. While I have no big objection except in 
> principle and realize that the vast majority of your customers are happy 
> with such a browser, I wanted to use the plain old fashion IE5.5 without 
> all the Dells birthday acke and advertisement . After trying without 
> success,  to bypass your WALLED GARDEN I decided to install Netscape. 
> While  I managed to install netscape  periodically it seems to be stopped 
> from running till I reboot, however it worked . I tried every trick in my 
> book including downloading IE 5.5 from MS. No luck, The Explorer by MS 
> with the Dell home page keeps appearing and I have been unable to bypass 
> it. I called your support line and was told -- sorry but that is the way it is.
>
> As a person who testified in the USG vs MS I was less than pleased to see 
> such tie ins -- lockins. I am sure I will eventually hack my way around it 
> all but I am not left with a warm feeling re Dell and most likely will go 
> to another vendor in the future.
>
> Dave

Second:

I had the misfortune of crashing my WIndows 2000 system on my IBM Thinkpad 
(which I love). While the boot said boot from your original CDROM and type 
r on the firsat screne to try to recover , when I did that all I waqs 
offered was to overwrite the whole hard disk and loose everything. Bah.

I bought a second hard disk, installed it and started the recovery process. 
Well to put it very mildly it is a highly un thought out procedure leaving 
a lot to the ingenuity of the user . If I had not had 35 years of painful 
exposure to weird systems, I would have thrown the machine in the garbage 
and gone back to paper.

We have to do better as a field. Why do I not wonder why PC sales are 
slipping. They either treat the users as dumb couch potato consumers who 
watch what they are told or expect world class debuggers.

Anyway still have a problem with the Dell although it is a fast system and 
my Thinkpad is slowly being revived

Dave




For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/