Vista: Don't Go There

Well, my Lenovo T61 arrived just in time for my trip. Everything is as promised, so I have to say Lenovo came through. However, Microsoft did not.

Vista Business was preloaded on the machine. I thought, maybe if the vendor had it preloaded with the options preconfigured, it wouldn't be so bad as Vista is reputed. Well, it was so bad, and worse.

From a usability perspective, Vista Business fails.

Vista is substantially slower to respond to user commands -- mouse clicks, movements, and command line requests. This is possibly due to the security features, but two to three second pauses on brand-spanking new hardware is simply unacceptable.

A big difficulty I had was with the combination of Vista Business with Symantec Internet Security Suite. It was well-nigh impossible to connect to my wireless network and exchange files with my older XP-based laptop. I searched for settings that might affect wireless connectivity, firewall, file system permissions... it is a rats nest of settings strewn throughout application panels, OS properties dialogs, and control panel settings... from a users' perspective there is no clear hierarchy of authority, no way to get Vista to respond correctly.

The "User Account Control" dialog opens after every application launch. Yes, I know there is a way to turn this off, but it isn't well-known and certainly isn't obvious. Besides which, unlike many good firewall programs, Vista neither remembers previous answers no offers to remember them. Adding insult to injury, often the dialog will open under an application window or minimized to the icon bar, leaving one to wonder why isn't my application responding? The delay can also cause some applications to time out, forcing the user to restart whatever it was they were doing.

The desktop migration software for Vista was unusable... it acted as if it was making a connection but never progressed. No warnings about connectivity, no recommendations about what steps to take for resolving the issue, nothing. After futzing around with the settings and turning as many of them off as possible, I finally wired up both computers and got them to see each other... sometimes. However, I decided that if my old XP system had a cruddy registry, migrating application settings might not be a good idea. So I just transferred data files and app install zips.

With Symantec installed, the system was unbearably slow to start up and shut down. A six minute wait time for a shut down is completely unreasonable!!! Uninstalling Symantec Internet Security solved much of the the startup and runtime slowness, but the shutdown times were still excessive, on the order of five minutes.

Twice, I got a blue screen error saying that wireless devices were not present. Wait a minute: this is a NEW machine. One of those times I shut off the wireless radio using the switch on the front of the machine during the 5 minute+ shudown. Are the drivers for Vista so poorly written that that they cannot deal with a powerdown condition during shutdown, or is the fault with Vista itself? Either way I should not be getting a blue screen with a new machine.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I don't need these hassles. I need an OS that is at least barely usable, so I'm dumping Vista and reloading my Lenovo with XP.

Don't Buy Lenovo Online

It was too good to be true. Lenovo had a sale in June for its Thinkpad lines of laptops, so I placed an order on the 14th. The Order status proposes a shipping date of June 30th, which seems aggressive but reasonable. The 30th comes and goes, without notice of shipment. I check back on the 1st -- nothing -- on the 2nd -- and wow, they've changed the expected shipping date to August 4th!

That spurred me to Google for "Lenovo Shipping Time". That was an eye opener. Apparently Lenovo has had major difficulties in order fulfillment for years (at least since 2005). Reading the experiences of people a few things become pretty clear:

• Lenovo knowingly falsifies its expected ship dates. This characterization is accurate because Lenovo has had years to collect data by which to predict with great confidence whether or not they can ship laptop products, yet the expected shipment dates do not reflect an accurate accounting of this history. One might claim they were "overly optimistic" a few years ago, but not now.
  


• Lenovo appears to have supply-chain management problems it cannot overcome. Again, this characterization is reasonable because if they could have corrected their own failures by this time some observable change would have occurred, but the externally observable behavior of the company appears unchanged.
  


• Lenovo employs a kind of "bait and switch" methodology on setting shipping dates. The particular method by which Lenovo falsifies the expected shipment dates appears to be to set a single fixed date for all parts of the order, then when that date arrives to switch the ship dates, with the laptop portion being the furthest out. Consumer experiences have been that this behavior continues, with some people not getting orders fulfilled at all (cancellation offered according to federal law).

One could reasonably conclude that Lenovo is as bad or worse than any other no-name supplier -- hardly the world-class company that the former IBM reputation suggests.

Update: I called to cancel, explaining that they switched the shipping dates. I also explained that after investigating I found that Lenovo had a history of doing so, and that if I had known Lenovo could not fulfill such orders I would rather purchase from another vendor. The polite woman on the line informed me that the expected shipping date was July 9th. Ok, that's reasonable; if it isn't shipped by the 9th I'll call again to cancel without second thought.

Update: July 9th came. According to the Web site, shipment status wouldn't be posted until the next day, so I waited and prepared to make a cancellation call. However, on the 10th the order status shows as "shipped". So now I enter the next stage of the game and ask the questions: (a) did it really ship, (b) was the product shipped properly configured per my specifications, (c) did they intentionally ship a defective unit just to respond to my complaint, and (d) will it get "held up at customs" ? Given (b) or (c), I intend on making a return immediately, because Lenovo has a very bad track record in this area.

Dentists, Fees, and Transparency

The dental profession doesn't make its fees easy to find. Never mind the insurance companies, the dental offices themselves don't publish their fee schedules on the Web. I suppose this is common for service companies.

There are at least certification boards. For North Carolina, the board is the NC State Board of Dental Examiners. An interesting read are the disciplinary actions taken against licensed members: http://www.ncdentalboard.org/disciplinary.htm
(Although you won't find many actions taken.)

XBOX 360 Design Defects

This isn't Wake County specific, but I haven't had anything to complain about recently.


My son kicked the RJ45 internet cable on his XBox 360 while it was running.
No big deal, right? It hardly tipped at all. Big mistake. Microsoft, at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909819/en-us, says
"If you feel that the disc was damaged by the Xbox 360 console in some way, please contact Xbox Customer Support."
as if they didn't already know the units have a defective design. Nothing in the support log suggests that the unit should not be placed in a vertical position. In fact, minor movement of the unit will likely cause a spinning game disk to impact a part of the drive and damage it.
Googling for the problem suggests that Microsoft has known about the problem long enough to have made manufacturing changes for our unit, which was purchased in 2007. One page (http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/news/Xbox-360-Game-Disc-Scratched.htm) shows the problem in detail, and how a little foam bumper could avoid the problem.