Grrr.....

I thought I'd start a new blog, as last years was pretty much all about travelling, and this is primarily going to be a resource for me to remember the things that I learn and to let off steam about all things technical.....

...what's prompted me to do this? well.....

Today the firm have bought a batch of PC's, a number of which are HP, and one is a rather sexy looking Sony Vaio notebook.... what's the problem? I hear you ask....well...

I'm seriously starting to despise the policies of hardware manufacturers.... if it's not bad enough that no serious players ship desktop machines with alternative OS's (apart from Dell, which I hope will start a trend), and even getting XP rather than Vista is a challenge now - the machines I have recently received have truly taken the piss though with literally hundreds of apps preinstalled....primarily Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office "Free Trial".

If I want software installing on a machine, I'll fucking install it myself......having just spent HOURS removing bloatware from PC's in order to get them functional at all and being unable to reinstall the OS due to the lack of installation media that ships with them any more I'm thoroughly dejected - it's almost enough to make me boycott these vendors..... The recovery media includes a preinstall of all the shit I'm trying to get rid of, as I found out to my cost!

If only I could get past the training issues and software compatibility issues and get everyone on an open source OS i'd be happy....