i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

I am writing you from my most awesome computer ever.  It's probably the most awesome computer I have ever personally logged onto.  Which is pretty funny, because it's certainly not "cutting edge." 

...

OK, so I have a low aggrevation threshold.  As you can see from my previous post I had pretty much had it with ancient (eight years old?) computers that just limp along.  This has been a festering issue for some time.  And, my evolving POV has entered into determining exactly what my hardware configuration ought to be.  I've spent a couple of years laboring on netbooks, which quite frankly, were as competent as my prior pretty good laptop that preceded them.  That's just the evolution of hardware.  And I quit using desktop computers quite some time ago because they were stationary and noisy.  (Though the irony thereof was my initial "super laptop" was also super noisy, having twin gigantic fans).

This wasn't precisely a "snap"decision.  As the result of pretty-good experience using my work windows remote, I envision [possibly] going to a client-server system.  (We'll see how that goes...)  So, I wanted to have a pretty capable computer for the server end of things.

But when you go to Best Buy, you are not necessarily buying "cutting edge".  I would say it's more like buying "cutting-edge obsolete."  Meaning, I bought the best of whatever is being phased out and replaced by something better, which I imagine describes the entire Best Buy lineup. So, while the OpenSUSE ati repositories offer "Radeon HD 8500 and above," the best I came up with was HD 6570.  And therein lies the problem.  I don't buy for "what will work with Linux."  I buy for "what is cheap at Best Buy."  (Although I started out with an ad in my pocket for a cheaper machine at Fry's, but Fry's is a long drive, so I went to see what I could find comparable at Best Buy.  I came up with comparable+.)  Best Buy was sold out of their HP monitors that were part of the HP "package" I decided to buy, so I ended up with a Dell monitor on my HP computer.  Pretty funny.

Well, I had not thought things out very well.  I had vowed not to buy any more computers with ATI video, because I have old computers with legacy ATI video cards that used to work lots better in Linux and now don't because the drivers have been abandoned by ATI.  Of course, that was on top of a vow to not buy any more NVidia based graphics for the same reason (I have a laptop video card that it is the ONLY ONE not supported in the Nvidia legacy driver package, but that is the subject of many other rants blog entries here).  Well, as you can see, I have limited my field of graphics rather severely to the point of pointlessness.

ATI, of course, is inextricably linked to AMD, so if I decided on an AMD based computer, the die was cast so to speak.  I ended up with a 6 core AMD processor, 8 gigs of memory, 1.3 TB hard drive, tv tuner, blue ray ... not so bad, it seemed to me, especially as my install location does not have a tv -- aggravating my wife a great deal more than it aggravates me.

The one in the store ran awesomely fast.  Well, awesomely fast if you just click on a couple of things and they blast onto the screen, especially if they are already cached in ram or whatever.  So, you know, bring it home, remove the Norton virus, put on some decent in the windows partition, slam on OpenSUSE 11.4 -- what could be easier?

Yeah, right.  Let the aggravation begin!

First off, it is going to a different location, so I did not have good place to put it while I worked on it.  With a great big screen, I found myself sitting slightly between where I can see the screen with and/or without reading glasses.  Annoying.  And, no convenient LAN cable, but the machine's got wireless, so not to worry (much).

Pretty quickly Windows was up and running, with it's normal collection of out-of-the-box virus-ware, annoy-you-alot-ware, sell-you-stuff-ware, things-you-don't-want-to-use-but-they-want-you-to-ware, etc.  With years of Linux behind me, I find all this stuff more annoying than when that was my normal computing experience.

My first aggravation was that Windows 7 boots just as slowly on my new-sooper-dooper computer as on my Windows 7 starter netbook, or at least seemingly so (I didn't time it.)  Then installing crap like Norton spyware/virusware took an exceptionally long time.  Which is not quite as bad as the old days, when you had to get some sort of uninstaller from Norton just to get it off the computer..  Then, as always, cumbersome MSIE comes up with MSN and Bing and all sorts of popular culture that gives me a headache just to look at.  Plus downloading for eternity some webpage items, elements, whatever, that I did not want, did not want to look at and more important DID NOT WANT TO WAIT FOR.

I mean, hey -- the single, only thing I will every use MSIE for is to retrieve Firefox.  (That, and some occasional miscreant vendor webpage that I need to use that insists on scripting only available in MSIE).  MSIE comes up and the MSN (home) page is so busy, at first I can't even figure out where to put the mozilla.com web address to "get me outta here" to somewhere actually sane.

After a (too long) while, I have the Firefox/Comodo/CCleaner/Google Desktop Gadgets install I want to run AND MOST IMPORTANTLY a "standard account" running.  Why is it Microsoft STILL promotes the insecure practice of running everything from an administrative account?  No wonder the web is an insecure morass of virii, spyware, hijackware and whatever..

Oh, one last thing if you happen to be following along.  Granted, I use the super-streamlined-don't-read-anything method of hardware/software setup -- BUT I DID NOT SEE ANY PROMPTS TO CREATE RECOVERY DISKS.  Why didn't HP have an automatic nag screen -- such as exists for Norton and all those things I don't want -- telling me to throw some blank DVD R+s in there and make recovery disks?  Could it be because if you forget, they will SELL YOU some recovery disks?  Hahahaha.

I waited too long to make the recovery disks to avoid that moment of terror/paranoia, but fortunately remembered before it was too late.  After all, my first Vista machine crashed out the entire operating system (and recovery partition) during setup (twice) -- and fortunately that time I made the recovery disks right off.

It was a bit difficult to even find the recovery disk prompt -- I had to go to Help and search around.

Next up, off to OpSu to burn an 11.4 install DVD.  Cool! Anticipating being done with Windows Aggravation, I look forward to my new and wonderful OpenSUSE 11.4 KDE 4.6 experience!

So, on to My. Most. Aggravating. OpSu. Install. Ever.

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