Saturday, November 03, 2007

Misc post

Couple things have happened lately. First, I am likely to do nanowrimo this year, but I have firm beliefs that I won't finish it. I just want to do it to practice writing, but in no way will feel obligated to complete the 50k words in a single month. Mostly to do so would risk time with family and I don't want to do that. In such, I am going to try using one of the online office programs as I am replacing my desktop computer.

I recently got a Zune, mostly cause it was cheap, and partly because I wanted a media player. The device arrived yesterday, but due to gaming, I just set it to charging and played for a while. Once I was done gaming, I started the whole installation process. Now I would like to say that I feel like I am handy at computers, I have cobbled together many machines and have limped many along for a while. This installation process left me with tons of wasted time. First off this is a gen-1 zune and I figured my 4+ year old desktop would suffice for it's media connection. Wrong. The Zune may say that it works with USB 1.0 but that is a lie. I spent 3 hours trying to install the software in such a way as to work with my device and at the end of that, I pulled out my 3 year old laptop with a broken power plug and installed it on that. But the problem is that it is a 1.4GHz Centrino which translates to slow. So today, I did some bargain computer shopping while waiting during installations and have purchased a HP Pavilion M9040N Elite Desktop PC. Usually I order Dell, but due to the fact that lately I have noticed more and more troubles with Dells (over the last 3 years) and coupled with a decent amount of machine for the price, I went with the HP. The real drawback I see here is that it has Vista. Sigh.

Along with this Zune purchase, I was also under the incorrect assumption that it could possibly work with Amazon Unbox since I have a couple of shows downloaded that I have not watched. Again, I am disappointed. Sorry Microsoft, but when I buy a player from you, I expect it to work with Plays for Sure. Yes, if I would have done some research I would have realized this. Shame on me. But this DRM thing is really screwing with the consumer. I mean, damn it, I want to spend my money with you fuckers, but I do and ... and ... and you punch me in the face.

(I lost in the beatdown again! I need to switch to boxer.)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So you bought a PC to power your Zune? That's f'ed up!

Unknown said...

Well.... technically, I decided I didn't want to use my crummy laptop to be my media hub. In the end, I was just looking for a reason to upgrade.