Is That the Way You Like It, Mr. Beeblebrox?*

When my desktop started crashing last week, I did what any smart person would–I went directly to Dell to purchase another. I surfed through the Outlet until I found what I wanted–small, powerful, NOT Windows 8–and I snapped it up. A happy ending, yay!

The next day the desktop crashed for good, so I started using the little netbook to get by. The tiny, deliberately low-powered (so all I could do on it was write), running-XP netbook.

Didn’t take long for the poor thing to BSOD on me. As soon as I got it back up and running, off to Dell.com I trotted again.

Netbooks are not much of a thing anymore. Everyone wants to sell tablets, but I didn’t want a tablet. I finally found a couple netbooks in the Outlet, but they were–the horror!–all Windows 8.

I dunwanna deal with Windows 8, I whined.

But…netbook. I needed. So I did some research. Some fairly smart sounding people said that 8 didn’t deserve all the hate. Also I figured I’d have to learn to use it sooner or later–probably it was best to do it on a computer that wasn’t my main one. I went ahead and got my precious new netbook with Windows 8.

And I finally know what it is that I hate about Windows 8 and smartphones and tablets. I hate the assumption that the only POSSIBLE use of any of the above is to screw around.

~*~”Chat! Social Media! Pictures! Music! Everything you need, right here!”~*~

“How about Word?”

~*~”Words with Friends!”~*~

“No…okay, forget that, I’ll get Open Office in a bit. What about changing the clock?”

~*~”Change your time zone here!”~*~

“The time zone is right; the time is wrong. I need to change it.”

~*~”Did we mention there’s a chat feature?”~*~

I’ve had the computers home about three hours now, so I’ve only just begun my battle with Windows 8. I have faith I’ll win. But in the meantime, Windows 8 reminds me of Eddie in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It wants to help, it just has no idea how. And like Arthur Dent, I just want some bloody tea.

Also the dang thing just spent half an hour installing 97 updates, and now it says it failed in configuring and is reverting changes.

Duuuudeee…

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*yes, I’m aware it was not Eddie who spoke this line. But it so totally fits…