aaron evans

I got a Dell Latitude D820 for work. What follows is a fairly predictable rant from a longtime mac user.

First, it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would. Sure, it’s ugly but I get the impression Dell is really trying. However, many of the typical PC oddities are present on this machine:

1. Lights that flash all the time to indicate that certain things are on or off. Why is there a WiFi light? Why does the battery light keep flashing sporadically? Do I need this kind of incessant reassurance that something is happening.
2. Ports all over the place. Some on the front. Some on the left. Some on the right. I guess you get the dock/port replicator if you want your ports in one place.
3. Missing features: no DVI out!!! What year is this? I can’t hook this up to my DVI monitor without buying expensive cables. Why is there no bluetooth?
4. Excessive buttons: why are there two left/right mouse buttons and two ways to move the cursor? Sure, people like choice, and this argument always wins in favor of simplicity in the PC world.
5. It’s big. It’s not huge; but there is not really a feeling that they tried that hard to make it small.

Overall, I’m not that unimpressed with this laptop. The Intel Core Duo is fast and it does its job.

My real gripe is with Windows. This is an operating system that hasn’t been updated in over five years and it really shows. It’s just painful to use. Here’s a list of gripes:

1. Lack of consistency. Let’s say you want to check out some info about your wireless network connection. Okay. You go to the Task Manager and you click on the little white icon that represents a wireless signal. Fair enough. Now, you can see you list of preferred networks and their settings. This is fine. Here’s where it gets odd. You click on ‘View Wireless Networks’, and this closes the previous window and spawns a list of wireless networks. If you want to see the TCP/IP settings for the wireless network, you click on ‘Show Advanced’ and this window closes and spawns the network connection properties. Here, you can change things like your gateway, dns, etc. It’s just not clear to me what the logic is behind having three windows that show different aspects of a wireless connection that link to each other in exactly one order. Window A spawns B which can spawn C. But you can’t go from A to C or even understand why the advanced tab in the first window is different than the advanced link in the second window. It’s just odd if you think about it too much. But, I guess the idea is that users don’t think, they memorize. So, I’ll just memorize which settings go with which windows and go on with life.
2. No zero-conf networking. Bonjour is so nice and has simplified my life. I find it so archaic to have to find the IP addresses of machines to connect two machines on a switch or hub.
3. Microsoft Apps try to predict your next move. I’ve heard that they finally stopped trying to predict a user’s actions in the newest version of office. I have to use Outlook and I have trouble understanding why I have to turn off many features to be able to type an email without it trying to correct my every keystroke. I also hate that menus are apparently so poorly designed that we have to hide the options that nobody uses and a user has to explicitly click on an expander element to view all items. Sure, you can turn this off, but it amazes me that people thought this was a the right solution to the problem of cluttered menus.
4. Common necessities aren’t built-in: The built-in Windows unzip package sucks and refused to open a valid zip. I had an ISO image that I wanted to burn and you can’t do this without googling to find out which software to install.
5. Announcements are annoying: The task manager keeps telling me things that I don’t care about or already know. Yes. I’m aware that I just unplugged my network cable. What’s worse is that announcements are controlled on an app by app basis and there is no easy way to figure out how to turn of announcements. Some announcements are simply impossible to turn off as far as I can tell.
6. and on and on…

I installed Ubuntu and it’s cool.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Apple, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.