A Goal Accomplished But Microsoft Shoos

Today I was quite eager to going downtown for the PC Fair - looking for the NX 6330 book. Something that I really wanted for quite a time. I wanted to save some money on fuel so instead of driving today, I took a train down to KLCC. I knew that I had to clear up my credit card bills, so that was the first thing I did. I am also aware of a probable occurrence of getting mugged, so I carried a bag alone and changed my money to a $100 notes. After all, having a small number of notes is better than having a big number of small value notes?

I had a tough selection today. Rather than going back and buy it unlike the previous occasions, I decided to buy my stuff today and go somewhere else tomorrow. After going through the entire halls to gather catalogs of notebooks, I went off and go through to narrow my selection. To my disappointment the NX series was not on sale today. Maybe the target of buyers are more for end-users but that book is under business class notebooks. After the first round of going through, I spent 30 minutes in the shopping mall going through and deciding which was best for me as well as money. My final three selections were Asus, Dell and HP. The Asus model that I wanted is good but the price is a little over after adding the upgrades, so that was off. The HP Pavillion was way off my budget and it goes a little over the actual purpose of buying the book - which is for work only. My reasoning to shun Pavillion and ultimately Dell was that the specs beats my intention of work. Finally I decided for the lesser known Compaq Presario. I think the slight limitations may help to remind me that book was not for media entertainment. I know the OS included was not good enough for work, so I paid another $500 for the upgrade - more functionality including the key component - IIS - very important if I were to do an ASP.NET application.

But the surprising thing from my decision to buy that notebook was that I was given two bags for free but the price for those bags was at $249. First was the normal bag and the other was the knapsack style bag. And then I get to spin for a special prize - came close to getting a IPAQ or a Samsung 32 inch TV but at least a spare pen-drive will do well.

On the way back, it's a thunderstorm. But reaching back home proved to be pretty difficult. Running the last 500 meters back home and got myself wet in the process. Ha. I was quite excited to see what's in the package and what can the notebook perform. I was quite stringent in the specs. Anything less than what I need might affect the performance. I think sacrificing some features for actual purpose and savings might be the thing. After this, I just have to focus on how to handle paying the remaining credit back to the bank. Just had those in mind already.

While I was testing the system and installing applications for my new notebook, I came across an interesting article. Microsoft was ordering all PC manufacturers like Dell and HP to stop shipping PCs in XP by December this year. They want them to roll in Vista. Come on, experts say that Vista is still full of bugs and incompatibilities - like some I've encountered just now and you want us to upgrade? Dell is still thoughtful of providing XP systems - particularly Professional Edition favored by every expert user.

It says here: "Many home users- especially gamers- do consider XP the 'greatest'- especially after all the media articles and benchmarks showing very poor gaming performance and compatibility on Vista," wrote another.

At the end of this year, however, Microsoft OEMs' contracts will no longer give them the option of selling XP-powered machines. This is despite problems that have surfaced for consumers as well as businesses, such as games and application incompatibility and driver problems.

Most recently, users complained that Vista's start-up, shut-down and application load times are far too long compared with Windows XP. Users on Microsoft's Performance & Maintenance forum, who sound pro-Vista for the most part, have vented about a variety of speed issues."

Read the article here.