Eccentric Flower:201005/Unboxing

11:53 On sofa with unopened box containing new touch-screen tablet/laptop. Also a Weapon of Opening +2, a pad, a pencil, and a cat. Cat is optional.

11:58 All components fully unwrapped. Surprisingly small lot: Laptop itself, two batteries (the spare was a cost-added option), pen, lanyard for pen I will never use, power supply in two parts, small chic black box of docs I will likely never read, and a broad black accordion-folded poster labelled "Start Here" which I won't even bother to unfold. Batteries are not charged. Have to go upstairs for three-prong adapter, as our living room has no ground.*

12:02 It boots. First hurdle passed. Cute case with all kinds of Mancuso-esque spirally designs etched on it. Same spirally designs on right palm rest when case is open. Left palm rest is blank. Where did they put the idiotic metal stickers for Intel and Windows and ATI that you can never remove without leaving residue or scratches on everything? On the right side, of course, smack on top of the pretty etchings.

12:06 Windows 7 setup wants me to connect to our wireless network. No chance. No computer of mine gets a network until I have made sure it won't try to do a certain number of Stupid Things.

12:07 All touchpad pointing devices stink, but this one is even less satisfactory than usual. It's not tall enough and I keep wanting to push beyond the top. The buttons are part of the touchpad surface, and though they give decent feedback that they're pressed, I'd prefer for there to be a bump to tell my finger "you've gone off the bottom of the touchpad area and into the button area," and there is none.

12:10 Windows' setup program finally finishes "preparing my desktop" and immediately throws me right into HP's setup program. Feh. Just give me the damned desktop. To demonstrate how useless this is, HP's setup has four stages:
1. "Register." Not right now. Maybe never. Registering computers with their manufacturers is often just an excuse for them to send you sales pitches.
2. "Stay updated." AKA allow us to turn on our automatic updater so we can download uselessness to your computer at intervals which suit us and will likely be right in the middle of when you're trying to do something processor-intensive. No thanks.
3. "Protect your PC." I will install my own firewall and malware/spyware protection, thanks much.
4. "Get online." Not yet, dammit.
There's no "just exit this whole farce" button so I have to tell it No or Later at each step. Norton is so offended that I might not want to turn it on that it asks me to confirm. Screw you, Norton. Your time will come quite soon.

12:15 Still not allowed a desktop. More initialization of some kind. The case is designed weirdly; the bottom is not flat; the back part with the battery is thicker than the rest of the case, so when you set it on a flat surface, you can either stand it on the battery part (so that the front edge of the case is hovering above the tabletop), or you can tilt it forward so it rests on the battery ridge AND the front edge of the keyboard, which has the effect of giving the keyboard a slant and was probably the intended purpose. But it doesn't quite work. Every time I set it down I end up setting it on the thick back part, and then if I try to type, the whole laptop rocks.

12:16 Desktop at last. Now to start cleaning out crap.

12:18 All of the useless desktop shortcuts (eBay? Why is there a shortcut to eBay? Did someone get paid off?) and items pinned to taskbar have been removed.

12:21 All useless Start menu pinned items have been removed. Now into the Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs, which has now been renamed "Programs and Features" just to confuse everyone. Can't seem to make the Control Panel default to "show me everything," so one extra click every time I open it, to get to "All Control Panel Items." Annoying. 4 GB of installed cruft (not counting Windows itself, of course). 4 GB is actually fairly light for most systems these days. Alas.

12:25 The touchpad is doing some sort of take-action-without-clicking which must stop immediately. I decide the touchpad settings are a higher priority than trimming the installed-crap list.

12:31 While reading about fancy-schmancy touchpad gestures, most of which strike me as the kind of idea that no one actually gave a usability test, HP registration pops up a reminder window. Already. That's it, HP. "Do not remind me again." You had your chance to get me in your database and you blew it by being over-eager.

12:35 Turned off about sixty touchpad gestures which simply made no sense and found the key to the problem: A setting called "Tapping." Apparently you can set this so that if you tap your finger somewhere in the touchpad surface, this is the same as a left-click. This is an incredibly stupid idea, and was on by default. When I mean to click, I will click. To compensate for this, though, I should note I found a lovely setting called "Momentum" whereby you can give the mouse pointer a nice strong push and it will keep drifting in the direction you pushed it. I recognize this would make some people just as crazy as the tap setting makes me. Well, at least all these things are changeable, which is really the most you can ask from any software.

12:39 Cat's bored. Can't say I blame him. Do not like new Start menu design where submenus expand inline (tree-style) instead of popping up submenus, mostly because there is no indicator symbol to show when something is/isn't expandable.

12:48 Uninstalling Norton Internet Security 2010. Suck it, Symantec. Your products stink. Requires a restart, which is pretty impressive for something that - properly speaking - shouldn't even have been activated yet. Tell it to restart later. I can probably uninstall a few more things before I actually need to.

12:50 I have to start Adobe to find out what the hell DigiFish Dolphin is, because their explanation of what they do is a PDF. Seems to be some kind of screen saver. Screw that; uninstall. Every time I uninstall something, first the system asks me for permission, and then launches that product's uninstaller either minimized, or under the Control Panel windows I have open. Not optimal.

12:54 Uninstalled two games I'd never heard of from a company called Megatouch.

12:55 Norton Online Backup has no explicit uninstall link; have to go back to "Programs and Features" to uninstall it.

1:03 Have uninstalled Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2007, Microsoft Office Suite Activation Assistant, Microsoft Works, and Virtual Earth 3D (Beta), the latter from Microsoft. (Why can't they just run Google Earth like everyone else?) Between these, I have lost two things: The ability to read Word documents (which I will never receive on this computer, because I don't plan to put an email client on it)**, and half a GB of occupied space that is now blessedly empty.

1:04 Oops. Forgot the Compatibility Pack for 2007 Office System. Another 68 MB freed.

1:05 There does not seem to be an easy way to uninstall all of Windows Live in one go. In fact there doesn't seem to be an easy way to uninstall all of Windows Live at all. This is once again a case of Windows trying to bundle something that is none of their business, or shouldn't be, and making it difficult to disentangle. I'll worry about it later.

1:06 Go to Computer (formerly "My Computer") for the first time, and find that in addition to the one hard disk that's supposed to be there, there are two other volumes. Are they virtual? Are they partitions? I can't tell. The "Recovery" volume is acceptable I guess, but the "HP Tools" volume is annoying. However, it's also tiny, so I'm going to not fret about it now.

(Can you tell that my ideal setup would be to unpack a completely blank system with nothing installed on it, and a Windows CD whereby I could run the install myself and choose not to put a lot of crap on in the first place? Do you have any idea why virtually no major computer manufacturer will sell you one this way?)

1:09 Sigh. Look at all this WinCrap. A lot of it I don't even recognize. Defender turns out to be its home-grown antimalware tool. I have no idea if it's any good. I prefer third-party software anyway, that way I'm not at Microsoft's mercy for protecting my computer. I decide to sort out what's what in Windows land later. For the time being the system's surprisingly lean.

1:11 Some essentials in Folder Options: Show hidden files. Do not hide file extensions. Do not hide empty drives. Do not hide protected files. I want a setting that says Do not hide anything, goddammit.***

1:13 There seems to have been a lot more work done on search and indexing settings, optimization of search, et cetera. Did people really do all that much searching through their own hard drives and file systems, to justify all this foofaraw?

1:17 Windows Firewall (which is lousy but is far better than nothing) is on. Internet Options are set on "kill." I guess we can try for a wireless connection now.

1:21 No sooner do I connect than Windows begins downloading and installing updates. Now I will restart.

1:27 Run the dreaded Internet Exploder for the one URL I will ever fetch in it voluntarily: http://www.firefox.com/ Have to take IE off "kill" and onto "stun" just to download the Firefox installer. (That's not a complaint, actually, it shows that setting IE on "so paranoid it can barely do anything" is working right. This is necessary because far too many pieces of software use IE invisibly as part of their interface. I used to change its access settings so that they couldn't do this, and it was a true pain in the ass - that's how I learned how often it happens. Now I allow access to IE, but keep it on paranoid. I do still disable access to all Windows components I think may be based on their old Windows Messenger code, which this time means Windows Live Mail. Microsoft perpetuates the same bugs and security holes for many generations and through many product names.)

1:40 My home page and Twitter both exist. Hi world! Hurdle #2 is cleared, a mere two hours after unboxing.

2:06 AVG is installed. It doesn't seem to want to accept the license key from my existing installation, which is annoying because it means I will have to pay for it again on yet another machine. Leave it on trial mode for now. I notice that AVG now puts up a warning saying, in essence, "There can only be one firewall in action on a given computer, so we are going to have to turn off Windows Firewall; are you okay with this?" They didn't always do that, and I'm glad they've started to.

While downloading and installing AVG, I put the screen in tablet mode a bit and played with the pen. Immediately obvious that pen settings will need tweaking. Doing something when I am merely hovering is lot like pretending a tap of the touchpad is a click. I run with the pen held very close to the screen surface. Hover means nothing. Until the pen tip actually touches the screen, you should not take any activity.

All that said, pen resolution appears good, and the handwriting recognition even mostly works.

2:16 Will clearly need to get CCleaner to help me disable hidden run-on-startup items like this damned Java update checker. No automatic updates. Ever. Ask me every single time you want to download something onto my computer; and if it's a download I didn't initiate myself, ask me as seldom as you possibly can. Especially if you are something as useless and buggy as Java. You probably won't get updated until/unless I find something that won't run with the extant version. Given how seldom I voluntarily use Java, that could be never.

2:26 I begin downloading Dungeons and Dragons Online, which will be one of the two critical capacity tests of this system.

2:29 While downloading DDO, also download emacs, because I don't run a system without emacs. The ability to hover over an app in the taskbar and see a miniature version of its window is nice, and enables me to keep an eye on DDO's download progress easily.

2:40 Emacs is installed and I begin typing this entry. DDO still downloading.

3:49 Have finished typing this entry. Notice that it is now four hours after I began, and I still have not: Tested the finger-touch operations; evaluated or downloaded a decent drawing program (there's one preinstalled but I suspect I will just have to give in and get Painter, the only drawing program I've ever loved); finished installing DDO; installed any other major software; finished cleaning out the crap list. Good thing I didn't have anything else important to do this afternoon, eh?

And this is why, next time I tell you I will need a whole day or more when I get a new computer, you should not assume I am just being hyperbolic. If they'd just ship these things exactly the way I want them, I could save at least a couple of hours; I could spend more time concentrating on putting on the things I do want, and less time taking off the things I don't.

I suppose if I had been clever I would have called this entry "Unboxing Day," but I'm not that clever.

* That is, I need a three-prong to two-prong adapter, which I use with the aware knowledge that by doing so I am bypassing the usefulness of the ground prong. It wouldn't matter in this living room, because the living room has no ground, so even if we had three-prong outlets in here, they would be a lie. The moral of this story is, don't assume that just because something exists, it is actually wired correctly, or even actually doing anything at all. Me, I prefer to keep things honest.

** Not to mention the fact that if if you send me a Word document, you take your chances that I won't read it anyway, because Word is not a common-coin format and as long as I am around to object, it never will be. Nine-tenths of the people who sling around documents in Word could have done the same thing with a bare text file and had it be far, far more transportable. Even the odious PDFs are a better transport format these days than Word. And that's coming from an Adobe hater of long standing.

*** Later I have to turn hiding hidden files back on, because it mars my beautiful pristine desktop with not one but two desktop.ini files. This is not just a visual quirk. I use my desktop as a temporary work space. Ergo, anything on the desktop - other than the Recycle Bin - is either "work in progress" or "temp file which I'm done with and can be deleted now" - and having permanent files show up there plays hob with my system.