Actually, a more appropriate title would be ‘On Over-Priced Pieces of Plastic With Some Silicon in Them.’ Or even better: ‘On 2,000 Dollar Calculators That Freeze Up When You Attempt to Adjust the Volume While Playing Solitaire.’ In other words, ‘On Cybermax Computers.’
It’s a screw up. Sure, at the moment it seemed like a good idea. Hey, it’s even got a CD burner. Cool. And a 32 gig hard drive with 16 MB of RAM. Plus a DVD player. What can go wrong?
So we buy a Cybermax comp. Two thousand bucks, wasted. I think the moment it received its hard drive it decided “Hey. I don’t have to be a cooperative computer. I’m a non-name brand. Let’s make Dell and Gateway’s names even better, shall we?” As soon as we hooked it up, which took a couple of hours, mind you, and connected to the internet, we discovered a multitude of problems.
We couldn’t stay connected for more than five minutes.
Whenever we hit Email, we got disconnected.
Whenever we sent an email, we got disconnected.
The internet goes horribly slow, even for dial-up.
We couldn’t download anything.
We couldn’t adjust the volume.
Now that we can adjust the volume, if we attempt to while playing Solitaire, it freezes.
The Blue Screen of Death appears at least twice a day.
Floppies always appear as unformatted when they quite clearly are.
After more than two hours of being on, nothing works at the speed it should.
DVD’s will not play.
Files cannot be converted.
Now we can download stuff, but we get disconnected a couple of kilobytes from it being completed.
We get disconnected and it refuses to accept the fact, meaning we must restart.
Diablo II, or any other RPG, will not play.
While playing a full-screen game, a secret operation to change the background goes on, resulting in an ugly cross-hatch design blinding you upon exiting the game.
MP3’s will not play properly.
At random times the arrows in shortcut icons turn to little red boxes, or little white X’s.
In fact, the only thing that works is the Update finder which tells me that, to fix all of these problems, I must download stuff, which I cannot do.
For everything to work would be convenient. For Cybermax not to have gone under so we might get some stuff fixed would be convenient. But guess what?
Surprise, surprise. It went out of business.
It dares freeze up, then complain about it when I have to press the Button of Doom (power button) to restart it. I’ve seen that ScanDisk screen so many times I’ve memorized it:
“Because Windows was not properly shut down, one or more of your disk drives may have errors in it. To avoid seeing this message again, always select Shut Down from the Start menu.”
How the bloody hell am I supposed to do that when the mouse won’t move? You may as well change the message to this:
“Because this computer is a piece of shit, one or more of your disk drives may have errors in it. To avoid seeing this message again, throw this useless lump of plastic in the trash can and demand your money back. If you cannot do this, go on a murderous rampage. You know you want to. Then buy a Gateway. You’ll be much happier.”
How I hate being able to truthfully say “My computer ate my homework” as an excuse for not having my essay done.
Dude, get a Dell.
