Lap top Epiphany

Article = none : This is my personal opinion.

Dell has been advertising lap tops for 17$ / month (over a number of years of course). They've also been blathering on about how they will soon offer Ubuntu (my favorite variation of Linux) as an option instead of Windows Vista (I checked their website recently , 4 flavors of Vista , none of XP , and no Ubuntu yet).

So I've been waiting and considering. Linux , or windows on this lap top ?

When I consider the lap top a toy , and think I'm really just going to play games on it , I shudder at the price. In order to run Vista you need a 3ghz clock and 3gig of ram on the thing, if you want to run the latest games. And the price of that is out of sight. And Ubuntu won't run the latest games so it's not in the running. A cold shiver runs down my spine at this thought.

When I think of this lap top for "productivity" , I feel much better. Ubuntu runs good on my old clunker , it will certainly run just fine on a brand new lap top of even the most mediocre of statistics. (In my case, I'm trying to write a novel, my actual work is answering phones - tech support , and you can't really take that home with you).
Ubuntu makes me feel good. A cheap second hand lap top will do , no need to go further in hock to dell for another 3 years. It's basically immune to virii except for the few samples written for purposes of FUD, those virii can't make it into the wild without someone deliberately openning their network to it (I wouldn't put it past microsoft to do that ... they bought Red Hat and are now using it as a whipping boy , arn't they ? ) It comes with a wack of free software that's just perfect.

VYM = View Your Mind

It's not a complex piece of software. Little thought bubbles with writing inside it , but it's great for organizing your thoughts and moving things around. Too trivial for people to make a profit in windows (unless you sell it for a ridiculously high price for such a simple thing) such a product probably can only exist in the Linux environment where it's being given away by volunteers. It's my fave for figuring out what's gonna happen in the next chapter or so.

Abi Word Processor.
when it save to HTML format , it does it properly. I press space three times before the beginning of the line, you get three spaces ! Wow... I ran through like five other word processors that didn't understand that concept ,they all ignored the spaces and shoved the first line right up against the left border. That is correct HTML , but I don't care about correct HTML , I care about writing a novel , and it looks real funny when you do that. :)

To buy a windows based "productivity" lap top is a non starter.
You don't save a thing on the hard ware, it still wants high end stuff. And it now wants you to purchase an office suite for your word processing needs , nothing really comes with it. And it's susceptable to virii like all get out. My wife is certain to want to play with the new toy , and she doesn't know that much about computers. She presses one wrong button and that thing is infected to a fair thee well, I will probably lose all my hard work.

And what does all that extra fancy hardware get me ? Nothing , in a productivity machine. The hard ware speeds up , now you must buy fire walls and anti-virii and stuff and run it which slows it right down again. Not to mention that Vista itself is a pig of an operating system and will run like the dogs breakfast on anything less than 3gig ram /3gighz in any case.

I can tell most businesses run on inertia because the business case for Vista , or even most windows , sucks bad. Lot of people just havn't come to realize that yet.

To buy a game playing windows vista lap top ... is out of my price range. Plain and simple. To buy a Linux lap top ... is the price of the hardware and not much else, and cheap hardware like that , nothing like what I would need to run Vista. Even if Dell backs out on selling new hardware with ubuntu, I may yet stop by this place selling refurbished computers that I know and pick me up an old lap top.

Call it an epiphany. Windows priced itself out of my market , and when you add it up, I don't have the cash for that. And the games arn't that important ,they can wait.

PS:
Everquest 2 sucks. The promised "solo" content isn't there, the player population is dropping like a rock so there's fewer and fewer people , waste of time. Who wants to play a multiplayer on line game on an empty server ?

Matrix Online : Even worse... they're down to what ? Three servers ? Everyone is max level and there are darn few beginners coming in to team up with ? Again , might be a nice game but who wants to play on an empty server ?

Back to World of Warcraft for me. I know, I said it was boring ... but there's always new faces and in the end that may be far more important than the game mechanics themselves.