Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Buying a laptop, withOUT Visa

It can be done. But it ain't easy. The major objections to Visa are extreme sluggishness, easily seen in the store, and extreme copy protection making it difficult to impossible to download music, copy CD's or DVD's, upload and download from your I pod. Advantages to Visa have not been reported by anyone.
Reloading XP over Visa is possible, but tricky. First you need a real XP CD. Those cost $200 at Staples. Then you need all the "drivers", bits of low level software that operate your hardware gadgets, disk, display, touchpad, wireless card, modem, LAN adapter, printer, DVD drive, USB gizmo's. The purpose of drivers is to make all the hardware look the same to windows. When windows wants to operate some hardware, write a pixel on the display, read the touchpad, write a block to disk, it sends a message to the driver, and the driver does what ever is required to make it happen. This allows windows to operate different brands of hardware that may not work the same way, even though they do the same thing. In principle all the drivers are available for download in the net. In practice finding them, and getting the driver that matches your computer EXACTLY, can be a nightmare.
All is not lost yet. Few to no companies are running Vista, so the "business" outlets still have laptops with XP. The "white box" people still do XP. We did encounter some web dealers with slogans like "Tired of Visa?".

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