Portfolioso.com Blog

My Laptop is a Piece of Shit

Take a 2.2Ghz AMD Turion 64 processor, and an ATI Radeon XPress 200M and shove them into a fucking dumpster. They can’t even render piles of 2D shit that come out of my asshole.

I get Guitar Hero III for my PC and this piece of shit laptop cannot handle it. 800×600, crowd off… Still no good. 800×600 is bitch ass resolution anyway – and my laptop still eats **** instead of syncing the notes to the music. It’s not like I’m asking it to do 1920×1200 with all the graphics up. All I’m asking for is minimum crap, and it still spits in my face. I don’t want to strum the note like 3 seconds before it aligns with the friggin’ align thinger (nice technical English I used).

I made a bad decision when I bought this for numerous reasons. At first, I was all excited because it was an AMD, which (for a long time) was better than Intel. However, Intel started Surpassing AMD around the time I bought this laptop. When I was researching the laptop, I was like “OMG 64 bit winwinwin!!!one1.” But unless you have a 64 bit operating system (with 64 bit drivers), more than 4GB of RAM, and 64 bit programs, there is absolutely ZERO benefit of having a 64 bit processor when it does everything in 32 bit mode. Second of all, my laptop does not have a dual core processor. Of course those came out the month after I bought it. I picked a bad time to be a freshman in college and buy this Guitar Hero-less piece of shit. Thirdly, look at these benchmarks – what a piece of shit. My 2001 desktop benched higher with the RAM, and Intel kicked its ass.

All the reviews said that this laptop was eh for gaming but I’m not a big gamer. As long as it did internet/FTP/Word quickly, I was happy. Then I got addicted to Guitar Hero and now I’m pissed. Oh well. Like all other things (that don’t deal with technology), I guess I’ll continue to suck at this game. I was supposed to practice so I don’t look like an asshole when I play people, but no.

My Internet Sucks

In the past few weeks, I do not think there is anything more annoying than having your crappy school network drop your connection to AIM every 2 minutes. You can’t set away messages, because when it reconnects, you’re not away anymore. I get 40 people yelling at me for signing on and off too much and for not answering their IMs even though I’ve been away from my computer for three hours, but AIM says I signed on 3 minutes ago. I have tried everything to combat this. AIM 5, AIM Lite, TerraIM, different ports, the TOC 2 protocol rather than Oscar, encrypted connections (using AIM Lite) and none of these seem to prevent my screenname from bumping. I flushed my DNS cache, changed my DNS servers – no luck.

Here’s what I do not understand: the connection peaks at 40MBPS (and maybe goes down to 3MBPS when everyones using it), yet it can’t hold a connection to AIM, which uses less bandwidth than runs the Yankees scored this postseason. This is not rocket science. It’s a simple connection that could be maintained on a 14.4k dial up modem in 1994. Something is seriously wrong with the network.

And what’s worse? It only happens to me. No one else (well it actually it does, but much less frequently). I seriously think our network staff hates me and set their firewall to “drop all his packets and give him lowest priority” mode. Priority so low that it cannot even connect to a simple chat server. I’m not downloading terrabytes of streaming video and running 3 servers – all I’m trying to do is stay connected to AIM for more than two hours without being annoyed.

Solution? AIM seems to be better on wireless, but that’s no good because it introduces another problem – abysmal speed and signal strength. There are only 2 access points on each floor, and they don’t do so well when everything is cinderblock. You’re lucky if you get a ping reply from the default gateway less than 800ms, if you don’t time out first. What kind of cheap knuckleheads thought two access points one each floor would be sufficient? And how come the wireless network does not even talk to the wired network? What morons set that up? For the first 3 weeks of school, they couldn’t even figure out why traffic would not route to a critical business school Intranet site. Seriously, stop going around and punishing people for sharing “copyrighted” material and start fixing your piece of crap network.

Thanks. (And that was the first rant in like 8 months, yay for my site being active again! Of course I write this at 3:30AM, rather than sleeping and worrying about midterms. What a student…