Unlike most of my "caveat"'s, these are "real" and not just a convention of this blog. Which is to say, I am developing some disgruntlement with respect to Google's Chrome browser. And I've got one last chapter to provide to the long saga of my disgruntlement with Sony Vaio.
I have been a major user of Google Docs – it's where I do most of my writing, these days. I like that my writing is out there in the cloud, because it feels safer than having my writing confined to a local harddrive. You see, I lost well over 300 pages of writing, including two novels-in-progress that I was actually rather happy with, in 1998, to a harddrive crisis. Since then, I have been meticulous about back-ups, but I also like to put my active works out in the cloud, since that way I can work on them and get to them whenever I have internet access, and regardless of from what computer I happen to be on (for e.g. when that laptops dies – see a few paragraphs below).
And as time has gone by, I've been using Chrome more and more, on the assumption that it would be the easiest and best environment to work with Google Docs – same company making both, and all that. This was a bad assumption. For the third time in less than a month, this morning, I had Google Docs "hang" and lose written material for me. I've NEVER had this happen in either Firefox or Internet Explorer. So I guess Google Chrome can't handle Google Docs. Which is downright weird. But… whatever. Fortunately there are lots of choices in the browser market, these days.
In other, related, Jared-rants-about-tech news, my old laptop died last night. It had been a long, slow, dying. That's why I had bought a new laptop (netbook, actually) before coming back to Korea in January – I knew the thing was sickly, with random crashes, and occasional boot failures.
It's been suffering from a decaying harddrive problem of some kind – corrupt and inaccessible sectors on the C: drive. I can still get it to boot into the Windows Server 2003 that I hacked onto it, and although that will be useful if I find there's any data I need to recover, it won't be very practical, as I never was able to find a Win Server 2003 driver set for the video card on that laptop, which means I get a very crappy, lo-res screen when I'm using Win Server, on that box. I only ever booted to the server if I was doing programming, which I basically don't do anymore. And the Ubuntu Linux OS I'd installed seems unbootable, too, although I may be able to rescue that by re-installing.
As an end-of-life review, I only have this to say: I will never buy another Sony Vaio. It was a universe of problems and issues during its entire life, from the memorable August day 3 years ago when I bought it. That one laptop destroyed almost a decade of built-up brand loyalty I'd had toward Sony. So… good riddance.
Still… I'll miss the high-speed video card (even though it sometimes would crash the box by overheating) – this netbook can't come close to competing, with its slow video card and small screen. I suppose I was playing too many games on that box, anyway.