1 post tagged “usability flamewars”

Just fixed someone's new $1,800 Toshiba laptop for them. Now I get why people consider themselves computer illiterate. What the hell do you do with a new PC laptop nowadays? After you get the box from UPS, it's all pretty much downhill. Power it up and you're confronted with a desktop covered in promotional shit. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get the wireless network working. I already know how to make wireless networking work on an XP PC. It still took me 15 minutes. Tried all the normal stuff; all I managed to do was put the wireless card's client in charge of the card (XP's client gives me agita). No matter what I did it wouldn't let me enable the radio on the card.

There's a goddamn physical switch on the side. Whatever. If I hadn't been so pissed I couldn't figure it out, I would never have noticed it. I went through everything trying to find it. Thought maybe the battery management on an unplugged laptop would disable the laptop: good luck figuring that out, n00b. Hit the power management and it tells you to close the power management and open the Toshiba power management console. Why not hide the other one or repoint the link if you're going to provide your own? And what the hell added value are you throwing in for the trade-off of me having to learn your native client and not having as many results in Google? The whole thing is a nightmare with a shitty looking screen. I did my due diligence and downloaded Firefox. It took 5 minutes to start installing after it downloaded because Norton took over and decided it needed to scan it for me. Fuck off and die. And I only got that far because I subverted the OS and Norton firewalls. Which I subverted because I knew that:

1. I was behind a router and pretty damn safe
2. Software firewalls fuck up more than they help

What do you do if you don't know? Why should you have to know? I shut the poor, stillborn thing off as soon as I could. Except I didn't. When I hit Shut Down, I was presented with three options, Restart, Shut down, Log off. Shut down had an asterisk on it, letting me know it wouldn't actually be shutting down, it would be installing updates and then shutting off when it felt like it. Good thing I didn't have a plane to catch.

I don't remember what this Powerbook's desktop looked like when I got it, but it wasn't covered in AOL and AT&T offers. And the Fedora Core 5 install I just set up might be a little spartan, but it encourages you to explore rather than scaring you off with too many options. Maybe that's only attractive to the kind of personality that would want to explore anyway, but maybe not. Maybe Dell and Toshiba and the rest are scaring off potential repeat buyers. God knows they're pissing off anyone who knows how it should work.