Fake Bill Gates

I’m looking to get a computer for my parents, and we’re pretty stiff on them not getting Vista for the reason’s below. When I was looking at all Dell’s site, I couldn’t find any options that didn’t include Vista. So I joined their CSR chat, and this is what followed.

CSR: Welcome to Dell’s Inspiron Sales Chat! I hope you are doing well and thank you for waiting. My name is Derwin. I will be your personal sales agent, please provide your phone number and e-mail address where I can contact you in case we get disconnected. How may I help you with your purchase today?

Me: I’m looking at one of the Inspiron 1525 packages and I was wondering whether I could get it with Windows XP instead of Vista

CSR: Hi <my name… no I did not type Fake Bill Gates>.

CSR: Dell has followed suite with the industry and we no longer offer XP. I personally use and enjoy Vista though. What concerns do you have with it?

Me: The computer is for my parents and they have some older, yet perfectly good peripherals that Vista doesn’t have drivers for.

Me: My dad’s job also uses some custom software which just crashes on Vista. In fact, they just got new computers a month ago or so, and they were adamant in getting XP instead of Vista

Me: Or is there a way to get the laptop without having to pay for Vista and I can install XP on it?

CSR: I understand. however Dell systems has vista on there systems [sic]

CSR: you can downgraded vista to xp though.

Me: Right, but if we’re not using it, we shouldn’t be paying for it. Does Dell offer refunds for unused Vista licenses?

CSR: No. i apologize for that.

Me: Thank you for your time then.

And that’s about it. Not only did his punctuation and proper capitalization go out the window, he used “there” instead of “their” but he should have said “our” (and his name is Derwin). It’s pretty clear that Dell has been skimping on customer service.

Apparently, Dell won’t let consumers buy !OS laptops to evade the Microsoft Tax, and they won’t let people get XP even if their software isn’t compatible. Good thing for me though. That means they have to buy my software and up my stock price. Thank you, Dell!

If you’re anything like Fake Bill Gates, you’ve seen the Mac fanboys using Exposé on their macbooks to switch from window to window (Fake Bill Gates is not jealous though — no one should be jealous of unemployed people). You may have seen the Linux geeks using the same exact function provided by Compiz (Fake Bill Gates is still not jealous — no one should be jealous of unshowered people). Exposé is a function that puts all your windows on the same screen tiled out so you can click on any one of them to bring it in focus. Here’s a visual demonstration:

The truth of the matter is that alt-tab is decent for switching windows (and far better than the win-tab flipper), but Exposé is much nicer as it puts everything out on one screen. The problem is that Vista’s Aero doesn’t have the Exposé effect installed by default. You’ll have to add in that functionality. Luckily, a programmer has developed Exposé for Vista (source available there too). It works very well and I haven’t had any issues with it.

Today, I noticed a bug in Vista. If you open up a .zip and copy (either through ctrl-v or drag) the contents into an ftp location opened with windows explorer, you won’t get any dialogue boxes at all (no error dialogues, and no replace-all dialogues), and you can’t do anything with either folder (no selecting or deselecting files, or even minimizing the windows). The windows both lock up, although files are clearly appearing in the ftp window.

And the copy seems to take forever… much longer than if you just copied the files out of the zip and then uploaded them. I’m guessing that it takes so long because the zip extractor and file uploader are waiting on each other left and right instead of doing it all in 2 batches. Then again, I wouldn’t really know, because I haven’t seen code since the 1980s when Steve Jobs and I were working on some stuff and he tried to claim that I stole it from him to build my gajillion dollar empire (Zuckerberg, I’m know how you feel). The worst part of this bug is that you don’t get the transfer status dialogue box either, so you can’t even cancel the transfer (or see the current status). Luckily, when I was uploading, some error occurred and I didn’t have to sit through the excruciatingly long process (once again, I couldn’t see what the error was because the dialogue box was suppressed).

This happens even on Vista SP1.

Looks like we’ll have a programmer to sacrifice to Ballmer.