My brother got me an Eee PC mini notebook computer for Christmas. I want to say right off the bat that I’m very grateful for the gift: it will be useful for testing web sites on Windows as well as allowing me to run Adventure Game Studio. What follows is more a complaint about what Windows users accept as how computers are.
It was covered in stickers. There were stickers on each side of the display, pointing out things that would presumably be on the screen when I turned it on. The trackpad had a sticker over it explaining the pinch-to-zoom gesture that everybody knows from the iPhone, yet iPhone users were never “helped” with a sticker on the screen.
When I powered it on for the first time ever, I was presented with the “Windows did not shut down properly, do you want to start in Safe Mode?” screen.
During Windows set up, it:
- Tried to connect to the Internet automatically.
- Told me it could not connect to the Internet and I’d have to configure it myself later.
- Immediately asked if I wanted to connect to the Internet to send my registration information to Microsoft.
When I launched Outlook Express, a wizard walked me through the process of connecting to the Internet (even though I was already online), asking if I already had a dial-up account or wanted to sign up for one.
Fortunately, the PC wasn’t pre-loaded with too much crapware, which is a good thing. I’m finding it hard to read the thinly rendered text used in most of the system; fortunately Safari for Windows does it’s own text rendering. Like my MacBook, it supports two finger scrolling, but the cursor turns into a tiny scrollbar graphic (in case I don’t know what’s going on?) and the page jerks around instead of moving smoothly.
My dad bought a MacBook Air for my mom, and I spent a long time setting it up. On the whole, it was much more pleasant experience, though in the interest of fairness I’ll say that using Migration Assistant over a network connection is annoyingly unreliable.
