Stickers

I purchased a new Sony Vaio laptop from CompUSA this afternoon. It had 8 different stickers on it, all of which required immediate removal. There were four from Sony itself, mostly touting the features of the computer. One was the normal lawyer bullshit. Then there were 4 others:

(1) Microsoft's Windows XP (Vista Ready!)
(2) Intel's Centrino Duo (the spec sheet says Core 2 Duo, but I can't be bothered with Intel's byzantine processor naming conventions.)
(3) An announcement that this laptop complied with some standard I've never heard of.
(4) NVIDIA letting me know that it provided the graphics chip.

All but NVIDIA's stickers were relatively easy to remove without leaving residue. The NVIDIA one really didn't want to come off. I pried and pulled but did not want to get one of those under the fingernail cuts that hurt so much. Anyway, I finally got it off, but it left behind a fair amount of adhesive. GooGone is great for this sort of thing.

I paid $2400 for this laptop. Does this not buy some freedom from intrusive ads?

Next post -- bitching about the 22 separate system tray "helper" applications and the 9 desktop icon ads.

Worthless Wizards

The world champion for this irritant must be the "Compressed (zipped) Folders Extraction Wizard". This wizard is so bad, it's hard to know where to begin complaining. First, do we really need a wizard for such a simple task? Second, if we must have a wizard, can't it be quick and painless? Do we really need the Welcome screen? Third, why is it so incredibly slow opening archives with lots of files? Cygwin's unzip is vastly faster.

Shell extensions can be great. When they don't suck.