Recently, ASUS and MSI announced 4 total tablets (not jointly) that would be released soon. My motherboard is from ASUS and my graphics card is from MSI – they work pretty well, so I’m confident that the hardware is not going to be the real issue here. It’s the software, and I’ll compare a couple tablet OS options to explain why.

Options for Operating systems:

• Android
• Chrome OS
• iPhone OS
• Mac OS X
• WebOS
• Windows 7
• Windows Phone 7 / Windows Mobile
• Linux (And this is complicated, because these are very customizable and some like Android, WebOS, and Chrome OS are altered Linux OSes)

Android, WebOS and the iPhone OS were originally meant for smartphones. They were designed for low memory and power usage. They were designed for small screen sizes and touch screens. They were designed to be powerful without requiring a 4 pound battery, and they both have app stores for programs specific to the OS (utilizing low memory, again). The exception is WebOS, but scripting on the internet is seldom very resource-intensive.

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As of today (actually Yesterday, in relation to the time I started writing this, as it is 1 AM), the iPad is out. According to Apple, it’s magical and revolutionary. According to tech enthusiasts, it’s missing some features. According to David Letterman, “What the hell is it?”

[many sources in this article are going to come from 2 articles I read in Time Magazine - to save the trouble of me citing every time, you can read them here and here.]

The tablet computer is nothing new. Microsoft’s been trying to stir up a market for it for ten years. But Apple is the kind of company that has fewer products, in order to ensure quality on every device and application, and provide a nice, uniform user experience. I mean, can you imagine trying to run one of the first tablets with a re-engineered version of Windows 2000? Not the best strategy there.

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The internet is by far the most changing arena in computing and technology in the past 10 years. The main applications for using the internet – which you may know as web browsers – have been changing recently as well, and will need to change in the future if the web is to continue to expand healthily.

Netscape, a long time ago, was the most popular web browser. Soon after, it was blown out of the water by Internet Explorer, and later dissolved into the Mozilla Suite. 10 years later, the face of the game has changed completely, with IE being the underdog in terms of technology and the dominator in terms of market share.

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This is mostly so I can use the image on another website to gain the upper foot in an argument, but it’s mostly true universally.

“Don’t be evil” is the corporate slogan of Google. As far as software goes in a political / market view, they are the good company and Microsoft is bad. Maybe their corporate slogan is “Please be evil. We bought 1500 extra devil suits and we don’t want to waste them.”

I’ll now go into pissed-off storytelling mode to describe my predicament.

I have 3 computers (well, technically more, but only 3 that are relevant to this story). My laptop, which is a relatively new and cheap Dell; my brother’s laptop, which is an old and also relatively cheap Dell with a lot of problems; and my family’s desktop, which is a Dell as well, but it’s running very nicely.

I run Windows 7 RC, which cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 – so whatever I will have to do, I must first wipe my computer at some point, reinstall Vista Home Basic, and then do whatever I have to do from there.

My brother’s computer is on Vista Home Basic also. We need to upgrade his also. We just don’t need to wipe his to upgrade, because he’s not on the 7 release candidate.

My desktop is on Vista Home Premium. It’s also a very capable machine.

So I call up the Microsoft support line a few weeks ago. I speak with a woman, and I eventually find out about the 3 Windows 7 offers:

• Full Package (will install on a new partition, blank hard-drive, etc) – $200
• Upgrade Package (will upgrade Vista to 7) – $120
• Family Upgrade Pack (same as upgrade pack, but will update 3 computers) – $150

So we need upgrades, and I thought, “Hey, there’s only a small difference between upgrading one and upgrading 3, so let’s get that one as I have 3 computers!”

Everything was seemingly, happily ever after.

Today, the package came, and so did the nightmare.

I opened it, and since my brother’s laptop had nothing valuable, I tried installing on his. First try, I figured out that the computer actually didn’t have Vista Service Pack 1. So I installed that while at Boy Scouts. Then I come back, and it gives me the same error when I try to run the 7 installation. Confused, and certain that SP1 did, in fact, install, I suspect something else is wrong, due to the general suckishness of his computer. At this point, I looked to the internet for answers.

One of the things I found was a list of “Upgrade Paths” – Vista Home Premium to 7 Home Premium, etc. The article didn’t mention Home Basic at all, and thus not on that list. Now I was beginning to worry – did I have to have his and my laptop on Home Premium instead of Home Basic to upgrade?

I phoned up Microsoft again, and spoke to a guy that I could have sworn sounded like Stephen Hawking and his robotic voice. Minus ~100 IQ, of course. He told me that if I was on Vista Home Basic, I would have to either:

1. Wipe the two Home Basic computers, and get a full version of 7 Home Premium for each one, costing a grand total of $400 (plus the $150 for the Family Pack I got today = $550)
2. Spend $80 for each of the two upgrading from Vista Home Basic to Vista Home Premium, then do the upgrade (bringing my total to $320)

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

I can count the number of differences between Vista Home Basic and Ultimate on one hand. I can count the number of useful differences on one finger. The difference between Home Basic and Home Premium is very small, and on principal it makes me mad that I have to pay $80 for that.

We eventually decided that we would finish the job and upgrade the two computers, but not providing an option for Home Basic users – a version which was marketed globally – is backhanded and sleazy, honestly. And all this just to get rid of the epic horrors of Vista? Seems like a bit much trouble, doncha think?

But I’m getting a Fedora (HAT, NOT LINUX) in a week and a half, so that will take my mind of Microsoft, the only company I’ve ever bought stock of.

Mac Joke

And on the subject of Macs, here’s probably the funniest Mac commercial that came out recently (the others kind of sucked, this was nice though):

[clicky]

I’m not getting a Mac or anything, but I’m a tiny bit disgruntled that I can’t upgrade Windows 7 RC1 to the final release :(

But then again, a system wipe might be good for me…getting rid of old, dust-collecting files sounds like fun.

This always confuses me.