T w e n t y S i d e d

Ubu Roi has a nice horror story involving an HP Pavillion. I have had my own issues with HP Pavillion in the past.

I hate these machines because of the misery they spread. Their low prices ensnare the less-savvy, and invariably their proprietary bits of hardware, vault-like case configurations, and greedy bloatware all cause frustration and headaches. The hapless user will then call their freind who “knows all about computers”. If you happen to be that person in your circle of friends, then you are going to be dealing with a lot of these machines.

My wife and I have both had to tangle with HP / Compaq machines from time to time, and the experience is always a miserable waste of time. These are machines designed by people from marketing and not engineers. “Sure, we could use an off-the-shelf power supply, but if we use this HP-only version then we can charge people an arm and a leg if it burns out. All we have to do is make sure the power supply costs a little less than a new computer.”

I don’t even know what can be done about this. I know better than to get one of these machines, but I can’t stop everyone else from buying them. I keep waiting for HP to get some comeuppance the way DELL has recently, but so far it isn’t happening. They should have an Edsel-ish reputation by now, yet they keep selling new machines.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Cinneris is talking about getting files from his old Mac to his Windows machine:

Someone trying to make the jump from Mac to PC might expect that this is an inter-OS problem, but it isn’t. Windows File Sharing has always been a flakey crapshoot.

Back in Win95 days, I had a 3 machine home network on a Hub, and I could never get more than two out of three computers talking. If I had computers A, B, and C, then C wouldn’t show up for the other two. If I got C working, then A would vanish. If I got A working, then the whole thing would go down and none of the computers could access the network. Then they could, but each one could only see itself. Then I’d mess with it, un-install and re-install WFS for everyone and find that the network was back up again! Except C couldn’t use the network.

Windows 98 took a small step forward in reliability. Not much, but when I was messing with C I no longer had to worry about screwing things up for A and B.

With XP, things are better than ever, which is to say: After about a decade Windows File Sharing works sort of well and most of the time will let me get files where I want them. I now have 5 machines and a router, and for the most part all the machines can communicate with each other. Once in a while B and E will suddenly stop talking to one another for no reason, but now I can get around this by using, say, D as a middleman.

Given how screwy WFS is after over ten years of development, I’m amazed that Macs can connect at all. I’m sure that for it to work the moon has to be in the right phase, your horroscope needs to be positive, and Steve Jobs needs to be in just the right mood, but that’s not much worse than the chances other Windows machines have at connecting.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.