I still have my old Acer Laptop which got me through an engineering degree from a technical college. I had gotten two of the same Acer laptop back in 2008. To my great good fortune only one of them got stolen before I graduated. It came with Windows Vista Shitty Edition. It ran all the Engineering software I tried to put on it, and even the crap software that came bundeled with the textbooks. It continued to run for years after graduation. I never lost a file or had a problem until 2015.
When I got it in 2008 the first thing I had done was lock the bios so no asshole could boot it from a pendrive while I was not looking. I worry about such things on campus.
In 2015 I decided It was time to ditch the Vista for Ubuntu. I could not get into the bios to boot from my pendrive so I could install the linux. I had searched the internet for a solution, and downloaded some freeware that was supposed to allow me to reset the bios password. The viral malware that installed itself with that pos freeware defeated all my efforts to get rid of it. I have fought malware, ransomeware and all kinds if shit like that in the past. I had always been successful. I had an advanced version of system monitor, and various other tools for dealing with malicious software. I was good with them. I knew that OS like the back of my hand by that time in 2015.
Nothing worked. It reinstalled itself like a dozen times. I erased large chunks of my file system, and tooled away on it for days before I eventually just gave up. Giving up can be a funny thing in personal computing. I had been trying to use the pendrive because I did not want to spend the money for a blank DVD to put the free iso image of Ubuntu on.
So I broke down, bought the DVD, Burned the iso on it, and flawlessly installed Ubuntu in something like two and a half hours.
I love Ubuntu. The linux shells kick the the ass of the old windows command line/dos prompt hands down every time. This was nothing like my Redhat/SUSE experiences in 2005, 2003, and 2000. I wish I had learned computers in the time before GUI interfaces and mouse clicking, but to bad. I am a product of the Microsoft family same as everyone else who graduated Highschool in 1995 or later. I cannot live without clicking mouse while googling.
I was happy with my 10 year old laptop, but then I started getting into crypto and typing a lot. My two reasons for gettin a new machine were keyboard lag and websites built with cloudflare. Sucks to type something and see only half of it poop out on the screen a few seconds later. Sucks to twiddle your thumbs for half an hour looking at a website thinking about doing something that should just take a few seconds. When my favorite porn site upgraded that was the last straw. I had to get a new machine.
I went back to the same refurbished Acer website. I spent about half the $ I did eight years ago, or rather 25% (Since I only bought one this time.) and got about 10 times the computing power.
By the way, I have a pretty good idea who stole my backup laptop in 2010 Shabree... I can almost forgive you because you have such great tits, but not quite.
My new laptop arrived less than a week later causing many comments and much speculation in the house where I dwell. I did not even turn it on for a few weeks. I just looked at it like it was a matte black Xmas decoration sitting beneath my old laptop.
I got my new stable release Ubuntu iso ready to go and fantasized about how great the future would be for as long as I could, but the inevitable can only be forestalled for so long.
On a random day in January I plugged it into the wall and charged it up. This is where the butthurttin begins. With full charge I tried to pop open the DVD tray. It would not pop open. It looks like there is a DVD tray, but after a lot of pushing, poking, and eventual googling of model numbers I was forced to conclude that there was no DVD tray. How in the hell can I make DVD albums like Elliot from "Mr. Robot" with no fricking DVD burner?
If I were still a student having to deal with required software bundeled with every ridiculously expensive textbook it would have been game over right there. Oh well. I'm not, so who gives a shit? I got my pendrive back out. Then I ran smak into that new uefi thing in the bios where I am suspicious that windows hides some sort of undeleteable seed for its microsoft store.
I absolutely detest that microsoft store. I was able to remove it once from my starbucks machine (An Acer Cloudbook with a hard drive smaller than my pendrive.) There was a major update to windows 10 shortly after I accomplished this feat of spyware/bloatware removal. The cloudbook hard drive is so small that I could not accomplish the update without calling Microsoft support. The ratbastard of a support technician would not give me instructions on how to use the pendrive as additional space for for the update until I gave him control of my machine through the obnoxious, loathsome remote access function which is built into the peice of shit somewhere between its soul and it's lizard brain. Horrorification Embarassment Revulsion. When He figured out how long it was going to take, he wrote the instructions in notepad which I could have done better and faster If he had just told me what they fucking were. Starbucks was closed at that point and I was now trespassing. Before he got off the phone he gave me the customer satisfaction survey which he cut short after he asked me how I liked Cortana. Don't even get me started on that bleepitty bleep bleep BLEEP BITCH! I went back to the starbucks the next day and went through the whole process again without a problem. The update was accomplished. It is important to maintain at least one uptodate windows computer if you live in the modern world. I just wish I could get rid of everything except notepad, paint, and firefox.
I apologize microsoft. You are a great company, and you make a great xBox. I will see you all at the big party in hell.
Back to installing Ubuntu... I made a fair attempt at keeping the uefi as is and doing things the new way before reverting to classical bios. I'm pretty sure it's possible to run linux like that, but it is definitely easier to just use the old grub bootloader.
I never used the windows 10 that came with my new laptop. Not even once. In fact I peeled the OEM liscense sticker and threw it in the trash before I ever plugged the thing in.
Ubuntu installed and ran just fine. I even encrypted the entire OS this time, so there are now two twelve digit passwords to crack before a thief can look at jack isht.
The first thing I noticed about my new laptop is that it is LOUD! Not loud like something that fits in a manpurse, but loud Like Acer built a crew of landscapers with gas powered backpack blowers stuffed into a porta-potty tryin to blow the roof off.
The second thing I noticed is that it runs hot... Not all that hot, but hotter than my cup of coffee.
I had a fairly long chat with an Acer refurbished support specialist about this and the lack of a DVD burner. This was an exercise in pointlessness. He could not tell me shit about shit. What he had to say boils down to this: "Use it like it is or send it back." I really wish he had just said it like that at the beginning, instead of beatin around the bush for half an hour, then wasting another ten minutes of our lives with the customer satisfaction survey.
I ain't sendin shit back. I spent the damn money. I'm gonna suffer for it (for the next ten years if I'm lucky.)
The third and final thing I noticed is that it occasionally looses the ability to resolve websites. The wireless says it is connected, but nothing can update, and if I try to refresh the browser or go to a different url I get a big fat cannot resolve error. I am too frustrated and disgusted to even try to track this down. I just disconnect and reconnect the wireless or reboot the damn thing. I am really kind of hoping that Ubuntu can sort this out on it's own with it's automatic problem reports and updates (which take a fraction of the time win10 would take, and which I have total control over.)
Well, that's about it. Here I sit banging away at my new loud as hell, hot as fuck hoss of a refurbed laptop wondering when it's going to loose the internet again or just blow the fuck up in my face.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the mousepad. Let me just asshurtedly bitch about that for a moment. There is supposed to be a left click and a right click like all polo-it-icali correct mice. For some reason the Acer engineers made it all one pad with no buttons. I am forever clicking left when I mean to click right and vice versa. There is also a sliding scrollwheel function that only works at the worst times possible. This drives me frickkin nuts.
My first laptop was a Thinkpad that had a little red nipple of a mouse button in the middle of the keyboard. That nipple was a bitch to learn to use, but once I did I loved it. It worked perfectly through two or three flavors of windows and redhat. Why does it seem like the shitty solution progressively gets engineered into the future and all the coolest things that work the best gather dust as sidenotes of history? Please IBM Make laptops again. I don't want my next laptop to be a Toshiba. That sounds like what by cat would order if there were a restaurant for cats "Two Sheba."
Oh hell, that brings me to another issue. One day my cat took a look at this bright ass screen and sneezed on it. The snot didn't come off very well when I tried to clean it, so now I have a few pixels that don't look quite right.
This is not your fault Acer. Bad Kitty.
Some final thoughts before I submit this work of asshurttin bitchery to eternity on the steemit blockchain... My house has had computers for a long time. Back when the Challenger exploded my dad had some sort of Atari machine that used a vacuum tube tv for a monitor, and ran off a cassette tape deck. He had written his own solitaire game, and proceeded to play the game for years without writing code ever again.
Back in 1993 I think we got our first external modem and AOL. The internet sucked ass and took forever to load, so I spent my time online in an AOL chat room where my first handle was phenix69. It was all anonymous fun and and games until I met spur290 who turned out to be the girl who sat next to me in English class. That cured me of the urge to troll until just recently when I met poloniex in my stupid quest to collect all the bonercoin.
In that same year I can't remember if it was the 286 or the 386, but the stoned virus got in through the modem. Somewhat prophetic. Haha. Those were the days!
In case you have not guessed, I am a failed computer science major, and occasionally bleed orange. That Particular CS program weeded people out like there was no tomorrow. I like to think I made it to senior status, but I am not quite sure. My classmates at the end were largely the spooky children of spookey people, if that says anything. To all my old friends who made it through graduation... You have my undying respect.
There were a lot of reasons for my nongraduation, but I will share with you a funny one. One of my favorite authors is Harry Harrison creator of the characters Bill the Galactic Hero and Jim Digriz aka The Stainless Steel Rat. I consider these guys my friends and role models. Somewhere among those thousands of printed pages Mr. Harrison tipped me off to a hilarious and disturbing notion. Computer Science is powerful stuff. Real programmers are not tinkers, although the tinker mindset does help. A real programmer can expect to be restrained and restricted in ways that most people will never bother to imagine. In a sceen in a book I cannot exactly recall, and might even have dreamed up myself, although I am pretty sure I read it... One of my heroes meets a programmer who is miserable at his job. He explains about the physical connection between his mind and the computer. He has a monitor and a keyboard and a chair. The connection is not some dinky little wires that he can pull out and put into his skull whenever he wants, but rather a gigantic metal spike on the seat of his chair. He sits on his chair for most of his waking hours doing his work with the spike up his ass so that the connection can be made safely to the tail end of his spinal chord. There you have it. The ugly truth about Computer Science. If you happen to know what CS gas is I hope you are laughing your ass off right now.
I hope I can do better on story#2... Some other day. It is time for me to go get drunk and poke around in my growing bonercoin collection. Surely by now one of my thousands of sell orders has triggered and it's time to respeculate. Later haters.