RE: Rant about my PC
October 30, 2011 at 10:03 pm
(This post was last modified: October 30, 2011 at 10:20 pm by Jackalope.)
(October 30, 2011 at 6:03 am)apophenia Wrote:
I haven't kept up with Acer's reputation in general, though I suspect they are likely on a par with others in the field such as HP.
These days, Hewlett-Packard pretty much makes crap (along with many other good brands from yesteryear). I've heard of problems with Acer products, though I've owned and been happy with a couple of their LCD displays. I don't have an opinion on their desktops and laptops having not used one in many years.
These days, consumer PCs at the low and mid end are pretty much commodity items built to a particular price point with all of the usual corner-cutting that occurs with commodity items. Obsolescence aside, I don't expect consumer electronics to last for more than two years - that wasn't always true, I have a friend with an 8 year old Sony Vaio laptop that is just now showing it's age, and I had a business-grade Dell laptop that I used for 6 years. Then again, both were >$1000 new.
Price tends to be a pretty good indicator of quality. You rarely get more than you pay for.
I use three laptops these days, my work laptop is an obscenely high end Dell (>$5000), my main home laptop is a mid-range (but well-equipped) Dell Inspiron 17R ($850), and my knockaround home laptop is a low end Lenovo G570 ($300). There's a huge quality difference between the consumer Dells and the high-end workstation replacements (not to mention performance).
Despite being very affordable, I'm very impressed with the Lenovo for what it is - though it was as inexpensive as it was due to being a previous model year closeout. Almost no crapware installed (I uninstalled maybe one or two things). It's perfectly adequate for most people, though I'm sure it would suck hard for anything more than casual gaming or graphics work.
When I get a new laptop or desktop, the first thing I usually do is reinstall the operating system from original media and any necessary device drivers. That ensures that there's no crapware lurking around. I didn't bother with the Lenovo because there just wasn't the quantity of crap that you usually get. YMMV, there was more installed on one a friend bought at Best Buy. Mine came from Office Depot.
(October 30, 2011 at 6:17 am)fr0d0 Wrote: If you have any data on it my priority would be to get that off. Get a connector to USB or slave it in another PC.
I'll second this. Any time you have serious PC issues, getting a good backup of at least your valuable data should be a first priority.
(October 30, 2011 at 6:17 am)fr0d0 Wrote: All of the crapware needs to come off any PC. All that's useful are any manufacturers own hardware drivers, and then the original ones: intel, broadcom etc are usually better.
Better, and almost always less intrusive. I have a major pet peeve for device drivers that install "helper" applications/widgets when the operating system has existing functionality that is more familiar and integrates more seamlessly. Hewlett-Packard printers are particularly bad in this regard, as are lots of wireless NICs.
As I said in another post, starting with a fresh OS install from original media, followed by loading whatever drivers aren't installed by default is good practice for new installs.
It's also something I do when I'm helping friends or family "fix" their PCs (I'm the family IT helpdesk apparently). It's often a case of having so much crap installed (either as-shipped or installed by the end user) that conflicts crop up and cause problems - particularly in the case of the technology illiterate that can't help but click on links they shouldn't, and installing every toolbar, animated cursor, and Cthulu knows what else because they don't know any better. It's worth trying a fresh install when you've got an unexplained problem that is probably not a hardware issue (in my experience the vast majority of problems aren't).
That, and those who don't realize that having their anti-virus subscription expire is a very bad thing, especially when it's expired for months. I switched everyone I support to Microsoft Security Essentials and automatic updates for this exact reason. It may not be the best AV/spyware solution, but it doesn't expire and updates come with Windows updates, so everyone is going to be kept up-to-date.
