We recently bought a PC for MB to use for working at home, and to replace the aging desktop PC she's been using for years. She already has an older PowerBook (a 550Mhz TiBook) that works great, but she has never truly "switched". Therefore, a new Mac for her was out of the question (unfortunately). So, I went on the hunt for a high-end laptop. MB wanted the fastest possible machine with a widescreen display. I ended up choosing an Acer Travelmate 8204. This is a 2Ghz Core Duo machine stocked with 2G of RAM and a high-end graphics card and hard drive. It also features a racy carbon-fiber lid. Sound sweet?

Well, it's sweet only if you haven't been exposed primarily to Macs for a couple of years. Even MB who never claimed to love her TiBook commented that "it looks cheap" as soon as we unboxed it. There's no sense of industrial design perfection that you experience when checking out an Apple product. Too many different textures and grades of plastic. Too many stickers proclaiming vendor relationships. That's just the exterior design. There were many other PC/Windows SNAFUs to be endured.

As soon as we booted the machine, we had to wait for about a half-hour for the Acer utilities to install themselves. Meanwhile, we're getting hammered by all sorts of messages regarding the lack of virus protection, complaints that some DLL or other is not safe, etc. After that was done, we closed the lid on the machine. The next day, I opened the machine at lunch, and discovered a "Windows is preparing to hibernate" screen, and a completely unresponsive computer. We had to reboot. This is a machine fresh out of the box, and it can't even sleep correctly.

Last night, I decided to start doing installs for MB. First, Office. The installation itself went without a hitch. But when trying to activate the software, we experienced a couple of glitches trying to connect to the activation server. This may be related to other problems that followed. I started downloading a bunch of stuff (over WiFi): Eclipse, Firefox, Java 1.4.2, etc. I also was forced to download and install a new version of Windows Media Player, since ours was already "out of date".

Long story short, all these downloads except for the WMP one timed out (wow, good thing we got to install that piece of crap!). Not only did the downloads crap out, but I had no network access at all after that. Thinking that our DSL connection had died, I went to a both a wired and a wireless Mac, and both were fine. I had to reboot the machine to get the network connection back. We tried one more time to download the JDK to no avail - another timeout.

I do not look forward to my next bout with this machine.

Someone tell me, how do people put up with this crap when using Wintel boxes? It must be the old "boiling a frog" story: if you throw a frog into already boiling water, he'll jump right out. But if you put him in a pot of lukewarm water, and turn up the heat slowly, he'll sit there and allow himself to be boiled alive. To mix metaphors, having cleansed my palate with Macs for the last few years, I'm like the frog thrown into boiling water when I have to use Windows. "Ouch! Oh my god, this sucks!". Those who never left Windows must just be used to crappiness.

Update:
The next few sessions with the Acer went better, although we could never successfully download Eclipse (I kept getting a connection reset error). I ended up downloading it with one of our Macs. I did download everything else (JDK, Ant, SmartCVS, etc.) successfully, and got all MBs development tools installed without further problems. The machine also seems to be hibernating properly when the lid is closed, so that's a good thing.