On Bloatware, Caps Lock, and Dell being Morons

[azureskies]

(needlessly long post, this - it was going to be a quick point about what is hardly a major issue, but... well, I got rambling)

This week, I took delivery of a new PC - a Dell Studio 15, a replacement for the netbook I'd been using for just over a year, which was itself a stop-gap solution after my previous machine, a ThinkPad (the last in a long

Comments

[embitteredpoet]

Stuff like this is why I decided to get my last pc from a smaller company (in my case pcspecialist).

[katstevens]

Aww I quite like that little sunshine dude.

Dude, never get a MacBook or your brain might implode. The function keys and Eject button things are exactly the same (though I've not investigated what happens if you try and turn them off). I have to say I've just...learned not to use function keys? I use the volume/brightness controls way more than F1-F5, anyway.

[hollowpoint]

Well, at least your computer woes have provided some entertainment for your readers. ^_^

I second the liking of the little sunshine fella. My laptop (circa 2007) also has the function key oddness but as far as I can recall it has the extra functions bound to the Fn press, rather than vice versa.

[crouchinglynx]

why do the likes of Acer and Dell think they
know how to do it better? Why do they have to interfere?Because they've introduced hardware that's a little bit more sophisticated (or non-standard), and have decided that Windows only provides lowest-common-denominator support while they can provide a more Consistent User Interface that they can show on the packaging. (I remember some graphics driver circa 2000, whose multihead-supporting software also included a reasonable virtual workspace manager - nice addition even when you don't have two monitors, but you don't need the specific graphics card either

[voter_colonel]

You have more patience than I do to fix these things, and I wouldn't have the technical know-how either. My solution would have been to march into Dell's head office accompanied by a friend with a video camera, and he/she would film me smashing the thing on the floor, yelling "satisfied?" and sttorming out. Then I'd put it on Youtube. But that's just me.
Also, Dell's marketing division are a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

[azureskies]

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future, etc. etc.