This needs to be easier…
Most people who know me know that I’m not an idiot when it comes to computers. Far from it, in fact; before I decided to take on the quixotic task of making a living with my writing, I was an Information Technology wage slave, working for a certain company that will remain nameless for the time being. Because of that, I’ve pretty much have certain computer-related routines down and I tend to do them quickly.
One of those tasks is switching to a new machine. At work, whenever I’d get a new laptop, it usually never took me more than half a day to get all my important data — mail, documents, etc. — transfered from one computer to another. By the next day, I was using the new laptop full-time and wiping the data off the old one.
So when I got a shiny (well, not that shiny, because it’s black) new ThinkPad T60 Widescreen (see pic above), I figured it would be four hours to get the data off my 2002-vintage Dell laptop and start working on the new machine.
What I didn’t count on were two things: a) I’m on my home network, not an office network, and 2) Windows Vista is a pain in the ass.
I don’t care what people say; using external hard drives over a wireless network — even one running at 54 Mbps — is shit slow. As I type this, I’m trying to transfer my e-mail between machines with my external disks being the intermediary. And it’s just crawling. I have about 1.5 GB of mail in various folders, and it took over an hour to upload to the external disk and it’ll probably take over two hours to download. What I should have done was connect the Ethernet port on one of my machines directly to my wireless router in order to speed things up. But I figured my relatively-new 802.11g router would be fast enough. I was wrong.
And Vista! I know Microsoft wants to protect their new OS from viruses and other dangers, but in doing so, they’re making the laptop impossible to use for folks like me, who know what they’re doing. I won’t go into the technical nitty gritty, but to copy my e-mail over, for instance, I had to perform so many extra steps just to get access to my Application Data folder, I almost thought I was logged in as a standard user instead of an administrator.
But apparently, all of these extra layers of security were put in by MS to keep programs and all users from modifying critical files. All well and good, but they should be able to have a way for knowledegable, responsible users like me — who hasn’t gotten a computer virus in years and keeps spyware at bay — to gain full access to my own friggin’ computer in one easy step.
Anyway, the transition is taking longer than I expected, which is why I’m typing this blog entry on my almost-five-year-old laptop instead of my brand-new toy.
Sigh. I almost went Mac this time around, but figured the price premium wasn’t worth it. Maybe Vista is going to finally make me cross over to the other side. I guess we won’t find that out until I replace the ThinkPad in a couple of years.
