Fuck you, everyone.
If I never see another computer again, I would not be terribly upset about it. This presents a problem, since my job (for lack of a better word) depends on computers.
But after a long and difficult night, and today's long and difficult morning, dealing with all kinds of retarded shit inflicted on me by Lenovo, Intel, the RIAA, and Microsoft, I am well and heartily sick of the electronic world, and a little bit of the physical one too. I want to take my laptops, and use them to crush the skulls of the people responsible for the bullshit I just had to go through.
So let's document this process, in the angriest, most unnecessarily profane manner possible:
1) Skype recording in Vista: Fuck you, Microsoft, RIAA, and SoundMAX.
I decide it'd be nice to record my Skype calls, since I'll hopefully be doing a lot of business calling with Skype from China. That way, it would be easy to go back and review meeting notes, client instructions and project parameters, so on and so forth.
So I hit up Google and download a couple apps to try out. Come to find, thanks to the morons at Microsoft, the RIAA, and SoundMAX, I am not allowed to record audio off of my own soundcard in Vista. The rationale there, I guess, is that since people apparently still pirate music (gasp!), they must be doing so by buying a CD, playing music on their computer's CD drive, then recording the audio at 1:1 speed through the line-in input. So any recording off the sound board is disabled at the driver level.
Take note, this is a new and essentially undocumented "feature" of Vista and/or various manufacturers' drivers. People using XP, you're in the clear. Don't ask me about Windows7, because I couldn't give a shit right now even if I wanted to. Also I don't care about who's actually technically at fault here, MS or the manufacturers. I hate them all.
But seriously? The only people this affects are the ones who want to use the feature legitimately; i.e., musicians, geeks like me, or etc. What kind of mouth-breathing digital (note: DIGITAL, you stupid assholes) media pirate is going to take the time to record music off his sound card or internet radio at 1:1 speed, when he could just rip it directly as fast as his drive or net link can transfer?
So I end up having to fork over some money to a third-party software company. At the least, this product (Pamela for Skype) has some extra features, like voicemail, return automatic calling, and so on, that to be fair Skype should already have. I love cheap VoIP and I'm otherwise pretty happy with Skype, but yeah... fuck you too, Skype.
2) My new computer's wifi: Fuck you, Microsoft, Intel, and Lenovo.
So you would expect, if you paid $1500 for a new laptop, that something as simple as wireless internet would work. Right? That seems like a pretty reasonable, logical assumption, right? I mean, a base requirement for a satisfactory product purchase would be the proper operation of all basic functions of said product, at least at the beginning of its life cycle... RIGHT?
Right.
So why, Lenovo and Intel, does my brand new X200s keep dropping connection? Fuck you guys. I can't even -- and this is key, here -- access the Intel webpage to download the fucking drivers to fix my fucking wifi card.
Whose idea was that? Nice job. Fuck you.
Meanwhile, my T61 is fine. Researching on the web, downloading drivers, and so on. So I start uninstalling the bullshit wifi manager packages you preloaded on my laptop, one by one. Oh, it looks like I chose to uninstall the wrong one, because it destroyed the wifi installation and now Vista won't grant me permissions to reinstall it.
Awesome. Fuck you, Vista and your retarded, nonsensical user permissions. What's that? I'm logged in as an admin and you won't grant me permission to delete this folder? I have to reboot into Safe Mode and do it from a DOS prompt? Why am I back in 1992 using rmdir /S? What's this? I'm still logged in as admin and you're saying permission was denied to copy a driver file somewhere, so I can never ever install drivers for my wifi card? Oh, and you're not telling me where the target location is, so I can't go and manually fix it? Fuck you.
So I restore the PC to factory settings -- after I spent about 3 hours stripping it of useless shit from Lenovo, Intel, and Microsoft -- and start again. After some tweaking, I manage to get the wifi more or less working. Still shitty, but at least functional. How, you ask? Yes, I removed all your shitty, bloated software and just installed the bare driver.
At this point, it's 3am and I get to go to bed.
Seriously, fuck you guys.
3) Vista language packs: Fuck you, Microsoft.
Admit it. We live in an increasingly digital and international world. Worldwide communications are expanding at a phenomenal rate, and the global economy blurs political and cultural borders more and more with each passing day.
So, why would the knuckle-draggers at Microsoft decide to forbid any version of Vista except Ultimate/Enterprise to change its display language? And beyond that, fail to tell anyone about it? Fuck you guys.
This is beyond moronic. I paid for Vista Business. In a product with the name "Business" in it, would you not expect that, you know, maybe some of your clients might be multinational? That it might be useful, even for someone who doesn't want to pay for and install all the over-inflated useless crap in Windows Ultimate to have the option of switching display languages? You think maybe there are people in the States who might not have English as their first or preferred language?
Well, I guess not. You'd rather rip people off for as much as you can for basic conveniences. Fuck you. I'm downloading your Chinese language pack right now, and I'm going to use a freeware third-party program to fix your mess.
(Update: by the way, that third-party fix worked perfectly. Fuck you, Microsoft.)
In conclusion: I am going to go for a run, take a shower, and avoid my computer like the plague for the next three hours.