I’ve always hated it when people ask me what is a good laptop to buy.
In Alabama, I know several people from my home country, and, because of my knowledge in computers, they’ve asked me to go to an electronic store with them. They wanted me to tell them what laptop brand is the best. I am often confused by that question, because I know what they’re going to do with it. They’re not going to play video games, or do video, audio, image or word editing. The laptop won’t even be a server of any kinds or for any business or academic stuff. Simply, their laptop is just for internet surfing. Why would they care which brand is the best?
I told them that all brands are good, but it really depends on what they need. “Well, you know what we need” seems to be the expression that they want to say, but they still want me to be more specific in “picking” the right laptop for them.
They want the biggest hard drive. They want the fastest processor. They want the highest memory, but they don’t know any damn thing what they were. Why the biggest hard drive? Why the fastest processor? Why the highest memory? What they’re going to do with it is just to download movies and music from the internet illegally. Well, having a big hard drive will answer the first question, but if they’re not going to do a lot of “huge” tasks (Those that will suck your RAM), why do they care about having 4GB of memory? They won’t even use MSWord, Excel or Power Point. It’s just a damn file sharing and Firefox. Indeed, Firefox uses a lot of memory, but if you have only one program running; that is Firefox, why do they care so much about having 4GB of RAM?
“But I want to surf the internet faster.” Eh, the memory doesn’t contribute much, but their internet access. What internet access do they have? I mean, are they going to use dial up, DSL or broadband? If they use the first one, their internet connection will definitely be so slow (See? Their RAM doesn’t have anything to do with it…at all).
I know for sure, that they want their laptop to be free from viruses, but if they surf porn and download porn movies, they will get viruses, trojan horses, worms, spywares and blaah blaah blaah (You name it). The list is so damn long and pornography seems to be the best “medium” for such computer diseases to infest. And then they download porn movies from Limewire Pro (It’s free! Why do I get viruses?).
If they just want to surf the net, any brand is okay. And, 1 GB of RAM is also okay (I don’t really see why they need 1 GB though).
Anyway, some other friends, however, have been calling me and wanting me to fix their desktop and laptop. There are so many problems. Their anti-virus software already expired and they thought it was okay not to uninstall it. WRONG! Their box is running really slow. I checked the memory. It was fast enough for them (It wasn’t 1 GB), but I immediately knew that their box was infested by all kinds of “diseases.” I cleaned them and I got all kinds of unnecessary registries, cookies or God knows what! No wonder why it was so slow. I did everything to make it run faster (I installed adaware, spybot or what not and ran them). I uninstalled the out to date anti-virus software and installed a free one (Clam AV or AVGnet). I defragged the box and deleted all of the unnecessary files, including uninstalled the unnecessary softwares. Some, however, want to keep some stupid softwares, because they use them to play poker or stuff! I’m not allowed to delete them (Sigh!). Some life!
I told them to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer because the former is much faster and safer, but they don’t care. They keep on using the latter, because they’re so used to it. I’ve already told them to use the simplest one, but they still want their computer to be infested and infected. I’m just tired (I think I should shut up next time).
Some other problems will be like wireless or LAN connection. They said either one wasn’t working. I checked everything, including TCP/IP but there was nothing wrong with the thing. I pinged www.yahoo.com and there was no response. I released and renewed the ip and it still didn’t work. I soon realized that it wasn’t my ip address. I had to restart the thing and turned on and off my router. It finally worked. Everything worked. When they took it home, the thing didn’t work again. It’s just a routing problem. Try turning on and off the the router and at the same time, reboot the box. You know what? Some of them even called me at 2 o’clock in the morning. I need to sleep. Why should I even care about their router problem while I wanted to care about my waning eyes? I hate it so much.
I have my problems too with my laptop, but I have no one to ask. I will never take mine to a geek squad because I’m sure I can fix my own box and I’m not taking it to any computer shop. My problem is mostly with my Linux application and I don’t think a lot of people are familiar with it.
Next time, when they want me to fix their box, I’ll just tell them, “Didn’t I tell you earlier to defrag your system, clean the unnecessary files, update the anti-virus software and delete all kinds of Internet junks?” It’s Microsoft. There’s always a problem with Windows. And, they’ll probably like, “Eh? What are you talking about?”
