R
ecently I helped my brother get his first
new home computer in eight years. (Geek
genes don’t run in our family.) Civil War
General William T. Sherman said war is hell, but
he never had to set up a new PC. My brother
and I spent two days on the job—and this sys-
tem was an off-the-shelf Acer with Windows
Vista preinstalled. I’ve built PCs from scratch in
less time.
What went wrong? Everything. We had trouble
with the monitor, computer, printer, cable modem,
optical drive, operating system, and even the
blank DVDs and CDs we bought. Nothing was
outright defective—replacements wouldn’t have
made a difference. No, our problems were mostly
caused by poor instructions, crappy product
design, maddening customer service, and clue-
less tech support.
Example: the LCD monitor. Out of the box,
the screen tilted toward the floor. We couldn’t
straighten it and were reluctant to apply too
much force. We couldn’t find a lever that might
release the spring tension. The instructions were
as terse as a teenager’s text messages, saying
nothing about adjustments. We had purchased
the system at Best Buy, so we called the Geek
Squad. Incredibly, they told us the screen wasn’t
adjustable. Finally we reached a lowly salesper-
son who confirmed that brute force was OK.
Vista Premium was “preinstalled” on the
hard drive, but it took nearly an hour to boot and
configure itself during the first powerup. Heck, I
remember when clean-installing Windows from
floppy disks took less time. For hours afterward,
Vista’s pop-up dialogs nagged us for permission
before allowing trivial actions. But when I acci-
dentally bumped the hair-trigger power button on
the computer’s front panel, Vista promptly shut
down the system without asking for confirmation.
Instructions for the Lexmark printer told us to
install two ink cartridges. We searched the box in
vain for the missing black-ink cartridge. Another
call to Best Buy brought an admonition to read
the fine print on the box: black cartridge not
included. The instructions lied.
I could continue, but I’m running out of space,
and you get the idea. Doesn’t anyone care about
customers anymore? I bet it will be eight more
years before my brother buys another PC. And I
don’t blame him.Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine
and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.Out-of-the-Box
Experience
FAST FORWARD
TOM
HALFHILLGet your geek on anytime the urge strikes!
MaximumPC.com provides a daily dose of technol-
ogy news, reviews, and commentary. The website is
also home to our weekly No BS Podcast, in which
the magazine’s editors and guests talk off the cuff
about issues affecting computer enthusiasts.Visit Us Online!
Will the Net
Be Neutral
or Not?
A Federal Trade Commission
report dated June 27 entitled
“Broadband Connectivity
Competition Policy” dismisses
the need for net neutrality,
saying there is no evidence
of preferential treatment of
certain data by broadband
providers. The report suggests
that the market is capable of
determining what’s best for
consumers (an interesting con-
clusion, considering how far
the U.S.’s telecom-dominated
broadband market lags behind
the rest of the developed world)
and that it’s too early to tell
what effect priority delivery for
certain content would have on
low-priority content.
But that’s hardly the
fi nal word. The Federal
Communications Commission
(which is also looking into the
matter) received nearly 27,
responses to its notice of
inquiry—an invitation for pub-
lic comment on this particular
issue. Senators, consumer-
interest groups, and, of course,
the MPAA and RIAA all had
something to say on the mat-
ter. Consumer advocates are
worried that if net neutrality
laws aren’t enacted, the tele-
coms will be able to charge
for priority or guaranteed
delivery, or throttle certain
types of bandwidth-intensive
traffi c (BitTorrent, P2P, video)
unless consumers pay for
tiered access.
The MPAA, for its part,
wants to make sure that net
neutrality “does not interfere
with the efforts of broadband
companies and content provid-
ers to solve the problem of
freeloading.” The organization
offers no specifi cs on how net
neutrality laws would encour-
age piracy or how a non-neu-
tral net would curb it; the MPAA
seems merely to want to make
its interests known. Meanwhile,
the debate rages on.
Firefox Closes in on IE
Nowhere is Internet Explorer’s
weakening hold on the
browser market more appar-
ent than in Europe. French
research fi rm XiTi Monitor
reports that 28 percent of the
continent’s web surfers now
use Firefox, up from 21 percent
last year. In some countries—Slovenia, Slovakia,
and Finland—use of the alternative web browser
exceeds 40 percent.Wal-Mart Sells Sub-$300 PC
America’s largest mega-merchant is now offering a fully
outfi tted computer for a mere $298. Wal-Mart’s Everex
Impact GC3502 won’t win any performance contests
with its 1.5GHz VIA C7 CPU and integrated graphics,
but those parts along with 1GB of RAM, a DVD burner,
an 80GB hard drive, and Windows
Vista Basic suffi ce for all stan-
dard computing tasks. Most
noteworthy, however, is the
inclusion of OpenOffi ce.
org’s open-source
offi ce suite and the
complete absence
of crapware.OCTOBER 2007 MAXIMUMPC 09