For my new job I chose a Thinkpad com­puter. Like every­one else, I pre­fer Macs. I have to use Win­dows because, alas, it is the only plat­form that my CAD soft­ware runs on. The com­puter was sup­posed to come with Win­dows Vista but I bought the Win­dows XP “down­grade” because I found some damn­ing sta­tis­tics: my main appli­ca­tions would run 20–30% slower under Vista.

I have had this com­puter for two weeks now. It acts strangely and crashes reg­u­larly. Where to begin?

Some­times, when I return and wake the com­puter after it sits idle, my pro­grams will re-appear but imme­di­ately the OS will start shut­ting down. I lose all of my work. My first the­ory was that I was acci­den­tally invok­ing a Windows-key short­cut (like Windows-S). So I hacked the reg­istry to dis­able the Win­dows key. No dice.

Often, upon restart­ing, the lap­top will con­nect to the wire­less net­work, only to lose its con­nec­tion. The next 3 to 5 attempts to man­u­ally re-connect will fail. Even­tu­ally it will suc­ceed with no expla­na­tion of what was wrong. The sig­nal strength is fine.

The sys­tem arrived full of Thinkpad-branded Clut­ter­Ware. This soft­ware includes a num­ber of util­i­ties that dupli­cate func­tion­al­ity already present in Win­dows (like choos­ing a wire­less net­work or chang­ing power-saving set­tings) with a vari­ety of incon­sis­tent user inter­faces. Maybe some of these pro­grams are caus­ing me trouble.

Ear­lier this week I got my first blue screen of death. The video dri­ver caused an ille­gal oper­a­tion, prompt­ing Win­dows to dump all 2 GB of mem­ory to a file and restart. When it booted back up, a help­ful util­ity appeared and offered to report the crash to Microsoft, but in doing so, it too crashed. A wel­come touch of irony!

To try to fix the BSoD prob­lem, I down­loaded an updated video dri­ver from the ATI Web page, but the dri­ver refused to install itself. Turns out that when dri­vers from ATI encounter graph­ics hard­ware branded “ATI Mobil­ity Radeon,” they are designed to abort because OEMs like Lenovo con­tract to be the sole provider of graph­ics dri­vers. For this rea­son the offi­cial dri­vers from Lenovo are per­pet­u­ally out-of-date. I found a very sketchy tool online which “unlocks” the dri­vers from the ATI Web site so they can actu­ally be installed. Works great… but how would the aver­age com­puter user ever fig­ure this stuff out?

It’s frus­trat­ing to think that this kind of expe­ri­ence is con­sid­ered normal.