Windows Rue

I recently had to set up a new HP Pavilion dv6 16″ Laptop.  It came with Windows 7, 64-Bit.  Aside from the fact that HP stole the keyboard design from the Apple Macbook and attempted to make their crappy plastic case look like Apple’s brushed aluminum, it’s not a bad computer.  Except that it runs Windows.

Though no direct fault of Microsoft, the trackpad is the worst piece of pointing hardware I have ever used.   The trackpad vacillates between totally dysfunctional and so aggravating I feel like moving back to pen and paper.  I can only blame the limitations of the trackpad on HP or at least on HP’s choice to by cheap Synaptics hardware .  Microsoft’s own poor software development habits are not at fault this time.  Though some of the quirky behavior of the trackpad may be fixable with better software, the current driver support offers very limited maneuverability.  The sensitivity is all wrong, it’s physically too small, and like many artifacts in the PC world that are core components of a computer, this one just doesn’t work well.

USB 2.0 was introduced to replace the limited USB 1.0 interface with something more robust and capable of handling faster data transfers for devices that required it.  It was also introduced to combat with Apple’s Firewire-400.   USB 2.0 claims to boast transfer speeds of 400Mbps.

Yet I sit here with a brand new HP Pavilion dv6 and a Western Digital MyBook 500GB external hard drive and can only muster 20Mbps.  The MyBook is fully USB 2.0 compliant, as are all the ports on the Pavilion.  Why would anyone advertise an interface as being capable of transferring data at a maximum speed of 400Mpbs, when I have never seen it – on any system or drive – move much faster than 20Mpbs.  That’s a 95% decrease in the purported speed.

Windows XP Professional x64: Windows is now a 64 bit tweak of a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit user interface for an 8 bit operating system based on a 4 bit architecture from a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition.