Aw dawg, this is just my whateva-whateva site.

Up until Vista was released, Acer has been shipping out desktops and laptops with the system partition formatted as FAT32. Are you fucking kidding me?

Vista now *requires* NTFS, so Acer is forced to use NTFS like the rest of the universe. What the fuck is wrong with Acer? I also hate Acer's other divisions: ALi (who makes chipsets that are actually worse than SiS chipsets) and AOpen.

To top that off, Acer still uses Toshiba MK*GA* (such as MK8025GAS) drives in their laptops. Huge "fuck you" to Toshiba for having hard drives that fail so quickly and consistently (the bearings always dry out – it's a design flaw that's never been fixed) and one to Acer for using these pieces of shit.

What a shitload of fuck.

I'll be back later with some more gripes.

Edit: I'm back.

Why does Verizon Security Center install its giant, buggy product even when you already have Norton Antivirus (which is bad in its own right), ZoneAlarm, Spysweeper, and/or even more miscellaneous protection programs? It doesn't even check for other security software, or ask you anything. It just installs. Thanks, I'm sure my user needed to run at 10% speed (due to dueling antiviruses) and/or blue screen/hard lockup every few moments.

Why does Sony partition its hard drive into C: and D:, where C: is around 10GB or less and D: contains the rest, and then not explain to the user that they need to store files on D: because Sony screwed them over? Why didn't they move Program Files to D: so that, you know, a user can actually install software without running out of C: space? It's nice to have an empty 245 GB D: drive, but I really think my user should have been told about this retarded setup beforehand. Now he has to pay me to combine the partitions and undo all of the damage Sony did by setting it up this way. And for what? Partitions don't increase performance, they only serve to complicate matters for end-users.

One customer's hard drive was failing (severely; hundreds of weak sectors) and I rescued the data to a location on my network. She had an extended warranty through WorstBest Buy, so I told her to get her drive replaced and get the system up and running and then I would copy her data back to the new drive.

When Geek Squad took a look at the drive, they told her they wouldn't replace it as it was working fine. Sure it was, that's why Windows boots up just fine and there are no bad blocks found by Spinrite or badblocks(8).</sarcasm>

I told her to raise hell until she got her drive replaced, and to tell them to run sector tests on the drives because it's very plain to see that the drive is failing. Just because the S.M.A.R.T. status shows up fine doesn't mean the drive is fine. She finally got it replaced and I finally got her data back to her. Oh yeah, and they left no OS on it – I had to use the Toshiba recovery DVD and install all of the updates myself. I guess Geek Squad doesn't really care if a person's computer is up and running and safe or not.

Speaking of up-and-running, a second customer with a failing hard drive went through the same deal with me. Apparently his drive was failing bad enough because Geek Squad didn't bitch about it being fine, and just replaced it. I put on the ticket that the computer should be brought back when it is up and running so that I could copy the data back at no additional charge (I only charged 1 hour of labor for the whole recovery).

He brought the machine back today and there's no operating system on it at all. Geek Squad had told him that I could copy what I salvaged off the drive back onto the new drive to make it work again. Sure, that's going to fly. So now I have to charge an additional hour of labor to reinstall and update Windows because Geek Squad… I don't know. I just don't like (most) Geek Squad agents. I understand that there are some of you out there that are like me, and that's fine, but as an organization, Geek Squad is pretty shabby.