Well, before I jump into my big ol’ pit o’ gripe, I will say the new laptops are faster (usually) and I much, much prefer Outlook over Groupwise, and XP is far better than 2000.

Ok, that out of the way, there are little things that are really hacking me off! Random slowdowns, not as frequent as they were last week, sometimes take 10 minutes to do things like login, minimize everything to see the desktop, etc. The next day or the next minute the same task can take just seconds.

Our new proxy (not necessarily related to the laptops, but we got it at the same time), is funky and causes you to log back in to it every now and then, often killing your session with any external website and making you login there as well. The external web app I have open the most often is my home e-mail, and it keeps logging me out of it, and sometimes I lose e-mails I’m composing when I hit send (REALLY annoying). Before the hubby gets upset, it has NOTHING to do with the mail server itself, which is recently updated and actually fixed a couple of tiny little bugs in Horde (plus I have a swanky new look’n'feel to my e-mail).

And today was just the icing on the cake. Some weird little popup appears and says I have to download an update (doesn’t say to what) that will require me to reboot. I can postpone for a number of minutes I choose (oh wow what a great feature), but I can only postpone twice. A counter clicks down next to the message telling me I only have a few more minutes to make up my mind. Some horribly stretched, crappy AA graphic is at the top of this popup as if to console me that yes, this is a valid request and not some piece of spyware. I was actually about to google it to see if it was some common virus or malicious program hitting the net, except it did have an AA graphic, and my neighbor got it on his computer. I guess that’s not really good evidence to click the Ok button in hindsight, *shrug* it’s not my laptop!

Anyway the point is when it was finished apparently, it did need a reboot. Only it didn’t do the usual think and ask me to reboot. It just did. I lost e-mails, open Java files, Word documents, etc. So, twenty minutes later (slow startup process), I’m up and running again. I shot off a gripy e-mail to our admin telling them they better remove that crappy little updater or else (there’s got to be some way to disable it, maybe some type of firewall?)

Sigh. The nice thing is I’m not paid enough to care here. So, after getting upset for a few minutes, I blog about it, shrug it off, and go on, ignoring the problem like most underpaid people do. It’s not my problem!!