Windows, I wish I knew how to quit you
My temptress, seductress and abuser. A glossy pearl that brings so much joy and so much pain: Windows. I am loathe you, but I can’t live without you.
Posted on May 3, 2011 by Bobby Gill+ in Editorial
This post is all about my temptress, seductress and nemesis. A glossy pearl that brings me so much joy, yet at the same time brings out the Ike Turner in me.
Windows. I am looking at you.
Our story begins with my work. To pay the rent, I pimp myself out as a hired IT gun. Think of me like Tom Cruise from Collateral. Except instead of causing 187s, I diagnose error code 354s.
So today I came into my client site, turned on my laptop like I do each day, and wait for my wireless to connect…and wait…and wait. Nothing. For no good reason, today my computer decides that its going to be a little punk bitch and not let me connect to my client’s guest wireless.
There I sat. For 1.5 hours, with 2 fingers, firmly planted, in my ass. Then all by itself, for no apparent reason at all, Windows connects!
That’s fucked up. I think I am a fairly competent Windows operator, yet I have no idea what to do when faced with these situations. The “Diagnose Connection” option is about as useful as Nintendo Wii is for Stephen Hawking. I wonder if there is anybody in the modern world who has ever clicked on “Diagnose Connection” and actually had it return anything useful?
So then I wonder…
What kind of retard PM in COSD designed this feature? Asking me to run “Diagnose connection” to troubleshoot a network error has the same chance of success as running a Scandisk has to fix a broken mouse.
The calendar says 2011, but I am sure Windows thinks its 1993
I put up with so much shit when it comes to Windows. It’s 2011, the US government just put a 9mm hole through Osama Bin Laden’s left eye after hearing one dude’s name dropped once 4 years go. Yet Windows still acts like it was 1993 and I was using Netscape 2.2.
Don’t believe me? I have one word for you:
Reboots.
It blows my mind that Apple can re-invent the computing paradigm in 5 years, yet I can’t trust to have my Windows computer running in the morning the way I left it before I went to bed?
That’s fucked up. I understand the technical reasons why a computer needs to reboot due to a Windows Update. Yet still, 20 years after NT was first introduced, after countless promises to “eliminate reboots”, even now, in Windows 7, the damn thing keeps rebooting on its own.
I just ordered a order of Daal, with 2 naans and 2 samosas, all from my phone, in about 3 clicks. Yet, I still can’t go to bed with my computer on.
I don’t want to be a Task Manager assassin anymore…
I tell ya, sometimes I feel like I am George W Bush, and Task Manager are the hills of Helmand, Afghanistan. I go through, kill any extraneous process which might be running, and then boom, 5 minutes later, those motherfuckers are back in there: Eating my cpu. Sucking my RAM. Faulting my hard drive.
I hate that in order to keep my computer running at full-speed, I have to keep Task Manager literally pinned to my deskbar. Why does iexplore.exe launch 37 different task instances anytime I want to check my gmail? Why does the SearchIndexer.exe constantly run and take 15-18% of my CPU time?
And so there you have it…
I want to break free. But I can’t. Just like Tina, I always come back.
Bobby Gill is Editor-in-Chief of IdeaToAppster.com, author of "Appsters: A Beginner's Guide to App Entrepreneurship" and the founder of Blue Label Labs, a mobile development lab based in New York and Seattle. In addition to building its own apps, Blue Label Labs provides design and engineering services to mobile app clients across the world. Prior to starting Blue Label Labs, Bobby spent 4 years at Microsoft as a Program Manager within the Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) product group. During this time, Bobby served as an engineering and architectural lead for the FIM server specializing in database and web service design. After Microsoft, Bobby worked as a Summer Associate at McKinsey & Co. where he was part of a service operations enhancement program within the high-tech industry. Bobby holds a Bachelor of Mathematics specializing in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and a Masters in Business Administration from Columbia Business School.
