Venting: My Dell is Great!

I've used OSX for five years, and had a near-flawless experience (it failed once when my drive died). My Powerbook-G4 is five years old, and has dust from 9 countries (AU, CA, CN, GB, HK, ID, JP, KR, TH) in it. I reboot when the update makes me, and I've had to purchase very few additional components (such as virus checkers, SSH tools, email products, etc).

The Dell build quality, OS quality, integration, and general user-experience would not be so bad if I had not been using a Mac. I would have assumed that every PC did this, but now it highlights what's possible but obviously beyond the reach of Dell and Microsoft, even five years old.

This tumblr is merely to track the little things I need to do every day to get the Dell to work.

Posts tagged reboot

Apr 15

Reboot: Sloth (Envy is Next)

15-20 seconds to close a dialog again.  Sloooooooow.  App switching is un-stellar, takes a long time.  I’m reboot-happy today.


Reboot due to Internal Confusion

The Dell has forgotten that clicking on a “close” box means to close an app, and selecting an app activates it. Reboot!


Reboot: Only Way to Free Up Resources

Dell takes 15 seconds to close a dialog — that’s closing a dialog without making a change, saving content, or anything.  Other systems can shutdown completely in 1/5 that time.  Since there’s no method of completely dropping resident Segment Memory held by an app, there’s one action left: Reboot!


Mar 27

Hung on Wakeup

Opened up laptop to find a ticketless Itinerary; hung.  Screen visible after coming out of hibernation, but no response to mouse movement (trackpad or pointer) or keyboard.  Reboot required.


Mar 11

Reboot: installed something

Windows requires a reboot for everything; I installed something, it needed a reboot.


Reboot: language

I added support for Chinese, so that’s another reboot


Reboot: vegetative

System’s vegetative; reboot!