OS Chasing (Part 6): Making an Appliance?
Over Thanksgiving, I had the task of setting up of a new PC for my mother-in-law over the holidays, a task which I was happy to do, but gave me another chance to get up close with Vista. At home, I have reverted to running XP, for reasons which I discussed in the last post of this series.
I had higher expectations for this new machine as my plan was to basically set it and forget it, since it will mostly be a web-browsing, email and photo machine. Sure enough, when I kept my tinkering to a minimum, I was rewarded with a much smoother experience. This was also helped by the lack of pre-installed trial/adware on this new Dell Vostro.
The only bumps along the road were the old printer not working, which is more Lexmark's fault than Vista's and the typical UAC behavior of asking me to confirm twice the heinous act of renaming a desktop shortcut. Then there was Windows Update, which after helpfully updating the Word/Excel Viewers, also helpfully set them to be the default file handlers for those types. A nice gesture, although it ignored the fact that I had set Open Office to be the default.
So beyond the fear that the next auto update from Windows Update will knock out the file associations, I have a tenuous hope that this PC will be able to perform the basic tasks of email, web browsing, light photo editing, office document editing, printing and scanning, with a minimum of maintenance.
These are modest expectations for a modern computer. Recently I have been seeing more attempts to make computers like appliances, with limited functionality, but increased reliability. For me, being a computer enthusiast, it is the general and not limited nature of computers that make them so interesting. However, for the majority of those who probably don't really care about the details as long as they can complete task x, y and z, an appliance approach could make sense.
I'll see how Vista fares in this role, but in the meantime, I fired up the old virtual machine and have been testing out gOS, the Ubuntu derivative installed on the low cost gPC from Walmart. Look for my impressions, an overview of its functionality and a possible explanation for the following clip art in the next installment of "OS Chasing".
