Microsoft, what is wrong with you? We had guests visiting this weekend from abroad and they wanted to buy a laptop here. We found a great deal on a refurbished HP Pavilion dm4 (i5, 4GB, 14", 500GB for $530) at MicroCenter. THe laptop came preloaded with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit). Once we had the machine charged and running at home, the first thing the owner wanted to do is to change the localization to Russian. Not an unreasonable thing to do, in my opinion - the guy speaks Russian and prefers to have his computer be localized to his native language. They all do that, right? I mean, look at an activation sequence of any Apple product - first question is always about the language you prefer. Linux is same, for that matter. Windows - not so much...
Imagine our surprise when we found out that this particular flavor of Windows 7 can not be localized at all! Only Windows 7 Ultimate (and Enterprise editions) are capable of downloading and applying Language Packs. This is unbelievable! Do you know how much it costs to upgrade Home Premium to Ultimate? Take a guess... Keep in mind that Apple charged $0 for next to last major OS upgrade and only $29 for the latest one. Here comes the answer - Microsoft wants $155 for the upgrade!!! Again, this is Windows 7 to Windows 7 - just changing flavors! Seriously, guys? I mean, compare that to the overall cost of the laptop!!!
So what are the poor owners of this useless Home Premium edition to do? Return the laptop and pay the restocking fee? Shell out big bucks to Microsoft just to get something that should be (and is on other OSs) so commonplace as to not even occur to ask or wonder about? Well, not without hitting Google first.
First bit of information - we're clearly not the first people asking this question. Duh! Second - here and there folks talk about attempts at circumventing this ridiculous crippleware. They look scary - regedit is prominently featured in convoluted instructions. But what do we have to loose?
The best instructions we came across are from WinCert.net. The author(s) did a very nice job by providing download links to actual language packs and decent instructions for installation/configuration. We decided to go for it. I'll spare you the details, including sneaky behavior by Windows in trying to hide the .cab file from us, etc. Suffice it to say that with a silent prayer, crossing all fingers and toes and rebooting after a particularly alarming registry change, the laptop booted up with a greeting in Russian. Whew!
What can I say - this was yet another in a long series of experiences which reaffirmed my deepest antipathy for Windows. No, other OSs are not perfect, but at least they "speak" your language!
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
One day with Lion
Having upgraded to MacOS X 10.7 Lion the minute it became available (as one should), I collected some observations (in no particular order) during the first day with Lion. Here we go:
- install from App Store - painless. Getting a semblance of an invoice from Apple - not so painless. Getting it reimbursed - we'll see about that...
- natural scroll direction - first thing to get disabled (Trackpad preferences). The idea sounds good in principle, and makes sense on iPhone/iPad, but I am not feeling like going against 20 years worth of muscle memory.
- new "scrollers" is the hallmark of Lion's GUI changes. While I do not miss old scrollbar arrows (good riddance!), the absence (until you begin to scroll) of an indicator of whether there's more stuff above or below the window edge is concerning...
- "back" in browsers - another preference change to get back gesture-based "back" button activation. How come?
- dashboard is better accessible now - that is a good thing
- TimeMachine on 3rd party support broken. Awaiting a firmware update from QNAP.
- Spotlight triggered a VERY long re-indexing of the drive
- 2GB of RAM minimum - my older Apple Mac mini "Core 2 Duo" 1.83 is out of luck
- dock icon badges with white outline scale down very poorly. Apple, are you kidding me???
- dropped Java Runtime (though available for download automatically)
- no waking up from sleep on trackpad movement? need to either click (which is weird on new trackpads) or hit a key. ANother unnecessary annoyance.
- Citrix "AGAdminService" was taking up >90% of CPU resources - uninstalled here.
- TechTool Pro 5 seems to take too much CPU as well - disabled it
- Adium's Skype plugin does not work - disabled. By the way, tried new iChat with Yahoo Messenger capability - nice, but I am too used to Twitter feed in my Adium, so will stick with that
- new scrollbars do not always get well-positioned in older software - NetNewsWire's left-most panel
- Finder preference - new windows default to "All My Files" - I do not think so!
- so there is no more ~/Library? Yawza! My Mac is morphing into an iPad right in front of my eyes! Option+Go in Finder to get to ~/Library...
- three candy widgets at top left are no longer candy. Too small - ever heard of Fitts's law? And .-+ edge-to-edge on mouseover look ugly! Will try going to Appearance = Blue to get the candy back.
- New GrowlMail v1.3 is available.
- Mail.app - letterbox is finally native! Nice organization of reply threads. Favorite bar - Microsoft Entourage idea?
- dialog boxes pop up a bit too aggressively
- WTF did they do with Address Book GUI? Apple, where is your legendary simplicity?
- native whole-disk encryption
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