OEM

One other (hopefully final) thing that annoyed me during the installation of the new Shuttle PC was this :

I ordered the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version of Windows XP Pro to go with the PC. Basically, for those who don’t know, the OEM version is basically just the software without all the bells and whistles of packaging, manuals, and all the nice customer-friendly stuff that you don’t really need. It’s packaging for people who are building their own PC – and it’s a buttload cheaper than getting the full “consumer experience”. And that’s all well and good.

However it comes in a cardboard box that’s plastered all over with “Don’t open this box ’til you’ve verified that you’ve been sent the correct version, as an opened box is non-returnable” and “if you open this box, you agree to the following licence agreement” – all the normal guff. But of course on the box there’s nothing on the outside of the box to tell you which version of Windows you’ve got. So you’ve got to open the box to find out, at which point you can’t return it if the suppliers have fucked up, and you’ve accepted the licence at that point too.

Fortunately, I’d received the version that I’d ordered – but I didn’t know that until I’d already accepted everything by having to open the keffing box.

I thought that these “you’ve got to open the box to read the licence that you’ve agreed to by opening the box” methods had been retired, but it looks like they’re still going strong.

Floppy

Out of interest, why do we still need to use floppy discs for driver installs and the like? The CD drive works fine, so I could use that. A USB stick would work fine too – but no, the Windows installer insists that the drivers be on a floppy in drive A: – no other options exist. Why?

It just seems like such an archaic thing to have – and it’s a pain, too. I don’t see the point in having an up-to-date latest-tech box that still needs a floppy drive. Up ’til this weekend I haven’t used a floppy in years – with the one exception of the server installs at CrapCo, which had the same thing, they needed a driver installed for the RAID stuff. And that’s it – the floppy drive will never be used again. Everything either gets burned onto a CD (or even a DVD now) or saved on the USB stick.

So – what’s the use of having a floppy drive, other than putting in these one-off drivers?

File Moving

Note to self : Even using a portable hard-drive, moving 40Gb of music files along with 10Gb of photos takes a long long time.

Although it’d almost certainly take longer to do over the network, so I suppose that’s a silver lining to this cloud…