Barb's Connected World

He has this one 100% on target. There is nothing worse than getting a shiny new Vista machine and finding it infested with craplets. Applications that the OEM was either paid to include (Norton, McAfee, Rhapsody, and all manner of unwanted garbage) plus trial versions of some software or links to it. Yuck.

Even customizing a machine on line isn't foolproof. There are some Dells that you cannot simply customize to NOT include some 6 month trial - you can select from AOL/Earthlink/Net Zero, but you can't select NO. Dell is used as an example, most others are equally as bad.

Here's Walt's video on the subject:

Last week I shipped my screamer VM box back to the company for the upgrade needed to enable cable card support (and to get a few things fixed - busted USB port and screw down the hard drive cage).

I am so missing this computer but when it comes back, it will be without question the meanest, screaming-est pc on the planet.

I wrote about this great pc on this blog last year. I can't believe how much I miss it. So c'mon guys, I'm going into screamer withdrawal.

One of my few complaints about HP's TX1000 is the 802.11g performance with the embedded Broadcom radio. 802.11a on the same wireless radio is better, but the G side performance was not up to my expectations nor was it as good as other Vista Broadcom chipset/driver combinations.

So, I asked my friends at D-Link for one of their new ExpressCard/34 draft 802.11n cards.

It (DWA-643) arrived this morning. The difference was like night and day. I can copy files over the network at blazingly fast speeds and no dropped connections.

D-Link uses Atheros (as opposed to Broadcom) chips in their draft N gear.