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Most laptop computers these days come with a number of “features” that drive me completely insane. Bear with me – I’ll try to stay calm

In particular – “preinstalled software” and “one button restore” are particularly egregious. My new Lenovo G555 is no exception.

The amount of preinstalled software was staggering. No, I don’t want to have facial recognition software protecting my computer from unauthorized logins. No, I don’t want identity theft protection management utilities from some software company I’ve never heard of. No, I don’t want silly wireless network control software that looks like it was written for a target audience of 6 year olds. No, I don’t want McAfee virus protection that only works for 30 days before it mercilessly hounds me with unending popups to pay for a subscription.

If the preinstalled pieces of software are not totally useless, they’re predatory. What’s the value in this from the consumer’s point of view? As a purchaser of a computer, I feel intense frustration with Lenovo for lessening the value of my purchase by installing a lot of things I don’t want, forcing me to spend my time cleaning things up to make my computer tolerable again. As for the predatory software, I feel “sold out” by Lenovo – they were probably able to “subsidize” the cost of my laptop hardware by letting 3rd-parties pay to install their programs on my machine. This is ridiculous!

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there is literally no way to remove all of the crapware to return to the original unmarred operating system. Sure, I could try to remove everything in the “Add/Remove Programs” dialog section of the Control Panel, but how could I be sure that the uninstallers actually removed everything? What if there are files and registry keys left – I don’t trust any of these software vendors (many of whom I’ve never even heard of) to do what I requested and not just leave backdoors behind.

After being foiled in that attempt, I tried to reinstall Windows 7. Oh wait, I can’t. I did not receive a Windows 7 DVD. My only option is to use the “one key recovery” button. What does this do? Oh, it just reverts the computer back to its original state, invasive crapware and all. No thanks.

My solution? Without any other options, the only workable solution is to go out and buy a brand new copy of Windows 7. This really irks me, seeing that I just paid for a perfectly good copy of Windows 7, but I can’t use it because Lenovo’s crappy “solutions” are getting in the way. Honestly? This is criminal, especially since there is no way to get a refund for the preinstalled copy of Windows 7.

So, after purchasing a new copy of Windows 7 (which wasn’t a total waste since I really want Ultimate instead of Home Premium), is it easy to install? No, of course not. The hard drive has special partitions to hold the one-key backup (in lieu of shipping the installation media). Really? Nothing on the website ever said “500GB* hard drive, * where you can’t use 25GB+ of the space because we’re too lazy to ship you installation media for the software you just purchased”. When did I give Lenovo permission to take some of the hard drive space that I just paid for to use for their misguided attempts in software distribution?

After blowing away these partitions (Shift+F10 during installation and diskpart overrides to the rescue) I was able to pave the machine and successfully install Windows 7 Ultimate.

What happened to the days where customers could buy hardware without all of this extra crap? Extra things (e.g. O/S, software, etc) should cost extra, and consumers should have a choice to purchase as little or as much as they need.

Sadly, this approach is not limited to Lenovo – I’ve had a similar experience with Dell and have heard horror stories from other consumers regarding other laptop vendors.

Has anyone else had a similarly frustrating experience?

Well, it’s been awhile, but (hopefully), the blog is back. Why has the blog been dark for over a year?

I thought about it for awhile, trying to get to the real reason. The “no time” excuse got dismissed pretty quickly, since I had various small pockets of time that I could have used.  Similarly, the “nothing to say” argument fades away quickly since I’ve continued learning and exploring the new advanced in technology that have happened over the last year.

What’s the real reason? It might sound lame, but…the barrier to writing a post wasn’t low anymore. Why? The general pace of technology advancement simply outstripped my current computing capacity.  More specifically, new advances with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 raised the hardware requirement bar so high that my 3-year-old Windows XP dual-core laptop couldn’t keep up.

Trust me, I tried. I waited 16+ hours for the installation(s) to finish, but the end result was a way-too-sluggish machine. 2GB of RAM just doesn’t cut it, and virtual memory off of a 5400rpm hard drive is doesn’t help much.

I guess this is to be expected – advances in software typically push the limits of available hardware (or is it the other way around?). This has always been evident in the high-end graphics card market.  I just found that the hardware requirement bar got pushed significantly faster these last few years due to Vista/Win7 and Visual Studio 2010.

So, the blog is back basically because I just got a new laptop

The blog’s been pretty quiet lately for good reason — I simply haven’t had a spare second to post anything. I have quite a few interesting posts in the wings just waiting for a last bit of polishing.

Why so busy?  Well, since the end of November I applied for, interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a job at Microsoft   As a consequence, I’ve been extremely busy getting ready for and making the cross-country move from Columbus, OH to Redmond, WA.  Needless to say, it was a very exciting and nerve-wracking last few weeks.

I started as a SDE (software development engineer) in the Health Solutions Group last Monday. I’m still learning the ropes and certainly relate to the feeling of “drinking from the fire hose“. Today was a “momentous” occasion as I submitted my first bugfix, only to quickly discover the need to submit a bugfix for my bugfix. It’s quite humbling being completely surrounded by veritable developer rockstars.

Despite all of the stress, I am absolutely and totally pumped to be here — my project is awesome and the people I work with are awesome — there are very exciting times ahead

Hopefully as things start to settle down I’ll get some time to braindump about all of the cool things going on.

Wow, these last few weeks have been a blur. Quite a bit has happened.

Intern at Microsoft

3 weeks ago I was finishing up the last week of my internship at Microsoft Research in the External Research group. It was a fantastic summer — I had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people and contribute to an exciting project.  They certainly kept me busy.

Some highlights:

• Getting to shake Steve Ballmer’s hand after the intern-only Q&A session before the Product Fair
• "Wall-e-ballers" coming in 2nd place at the company picnic volleyball tournament (which was incredible — they could only fit in 25,000 people per day so they needed 3 days for it)
• Being there for Bill Gates’ last day
• Seeing Bill Gates’ house from the vantage point of a Lake Washington cruise ship
• Meeting Rick Rashid, senior VP of research (worldwide)
• Meeting Rico Malvar, director of my building at MSR Redmond
• Attending the Faculty Summit and seeing all sorts of cool stuff first-hand like the Surface Sphere and LucidTouch

What project was I working on? the Trident scientific workflow workbench.  And, no, Trident isn’t a code name — it’s the actual name of the project.   Trident recognizes the fact that scientists need to accomplish a myriad of computational-intensive tasks (e.g. data processing) but don’t necessarily want to learn all of the IT- or computer-related steps to do so.  Most researchers would much rather focus on the science they are trying to accomplish than the details of how they accomplish that task. Trident addresses this in a clean manner by allowing common procedures to be encapsulated into "activities" which are reusable code modules with well-defined inputs and outputs.  Scientists can then create workflows (programs) from these activities by specifying the sequence in which they execute (control flow) as well as the data connections between activities (data flow).  This type of thing really has the potential to completely change how scientists and researchers look at computing, allowing them to become more productive and lower the "time-to-insight".

Trident is built on top of .NET 3.0, heavily utilizing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as the activity/workflow model and execution runtime, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the graphical workflow designer, and Windows Communication Foundation for the inter-machine communication.

Jon Udell interviewed Roger Barga, the principle architect of Trident (and my boss/colleague this summer) about Trident here and here. I’m really looking forward to see how this project turns out.

Coming Home

2 weeks ago I was making my way from Seattle, WA back home to Ohio.  Thankfully the plane ride was rather uneventful.  I had a layover in O’Hare and immediately recognized it from the movie Home Alone It was only 3 hours of time difference, so the jet lag wasn’t too bad, but I sure had a lot to catch up on.  Needless to say, my wife was glad that I am back.

Remnants of Ike

Last Sunday afternoon the remnants of Ike came roaring through Ohio with 75mph winds, causing widespread power outages. While nothing compared to what happened in Texas, it was still pretty rattling.  I think some 450,000 residents in central Ohio were without power at one point, and it was 4 days before our power came back on. American Electric Power (AEP) confessed that they were short-handed since they’d sent most of their repair force to Texas to help, only to bring them right back.

Despite the inconvenience, it was actually nice to have a chance (though forced) to "unplug" for a day or two — to stop rushing around, slave to every electronic distraction (did I get an email? What’s on TV?) and actually talk to people. I even learned how to play cribbage (by candlelight).

Anyway, now that things are "back to normal", my posts will return to the regularly-scheduled technical programming influenced by whatever coding project I’m currently working on