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[bubosquared]

Spring is in the air, which means it's time for my annual computer muck-out. In addition to the DVD drive I mentioned yesterday, I'm thinking of either getting a second hard drive, or partitioning my current one (since I'll be reformatting it anyway) and dual booting Linux ("some flavour of Unix"? Maybe I should read up on this before I start fudging about with it, heh.

Really, though, it's mostly because the way Vista apparently hogs memory and resources, I'd need another hardware upgrade to be able to run it in anything approaching a "smooth" manner. Now, sure, I've been idly thinking of stuffing another gig of RAM in my box, but that's because I'm still having a wee spot of trouble when I'm running Thunderbird, FireFox, iTunes, WoW and The Sims 2 concurrently ("Why?" "BECAUSE I CAN!") and I like the idea of maxing out on RAM after six years on 128MB, not so Vista can feed itself on the RAM.

Sure, I'll stick with XP for a while yet anyway, because I may not be that big of a geek, but I know better than to upgrade Windows until at least a year and a couple of updates after release, but sooner or later, I know I'll get dragged forward kicking and screaming, and I rather don't relish the idea of paying Billy-boy another wad of money for a standalone version of Windows.

So: DVD writer, possibly extra hard drive, possibly more RAM. Was going to get a replacement battery for Samwise, but after three months of consistent battery issues, then added hard drive tomfoolery, he's suddenly behaving perfectly again (o_O), so that won't be necessary. And ooh, maybe rather than use DVDs for backups, I should have a look at the external hard drives. Or, if I get an internal hard drive, back up to that? Can I do that? Should I do that? Or should I just stop rambling?

Oooooo-kaaaaay, a customer's problem just randomly decided to go away as he was explaining it to me. That's right, PH34R ME and my powers of D00M! \o/

... And then the universe smacked me down for my hubris by sending me a bloke whose e-mail addy starts is "dr.big.job@[snip]," and who, in a single call, did things like double-clicking on a file I asked him to locate (I hate happy clickers), "Delete key? Have I got one of those then?", and in response to my request to "select all," went "select WHO?" AUGH. I know I'd be out of a job if everyone was tech-savvy, but for the love of GOD, people, computer knowledge has no correlation to your ability to follow instructions. I'm perfectly willing to clarify and dumb down if needed, but I'm about to start making people take an oath before I help them that they will follow my instructions, my full instructions, and only my instructions, so help them God and a clue-by-four.

And don't even get me started on happy clicker type techs, who should really fucking know better than to mess around with software they don't support (I'm looking at you, T-Mobile) and especially shouldn't just randomly start deleting crap. WTF, over. (Quoth the customer: "I should've known he didn't know what he was doing when the first thing he did was take out the card and blow on the contacts and into the slot." Me, thinking: "Heh. I spot a former NES owner ...")

Is it the weekend yet?

Comments

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I prefer to at least wait to switch. I listen to enough gripes from people who bought a new computer, had to get Vista, and are now struggling with every other piece of software. Gah.