Vista-less

Just now at Circuit City, I was 30 seconds away from buying a new laptop with Vista. Then fate intervened, in the form of a humongous, surly sales clerk. "Buying a Vista machine?" he asked, then he did this long, pantomimed grimace that was a little awkward to watch. I said to myself, "What this man lacks in social graces he probably makes up for in operating system knowledge." My decision was sealed and I came home laptop-less.

If there's one thing I've learned with regards to technology, it's to defer technical decisions to the dorkiest guy in the room. There are a few ways to tell who this might be.

If anyone in the room is wearing Vulcan ears, you've found your guy.
If there are no Vulcan ears but someone is explaining to someone else how to solve a Rubik's cube, you've found your guy (the explainer, not the explainee, who is probably dead weight).

Without either of those, go with your gut, and then ask your gut's choice a really geeky question. That's what I did tonight; my question was about the L2 cache on AMD's new dual-core processors. His answer, lengthy and annotated, was a lot better than mine, which would've been, "I'm pretty sure it exists." (If you don't know any geeky questions, just ask about last week's episode of Battlestar, whether he agrees with you that Greedo shot first, which Frank Herbert character is the sexiest, or his choice of avatar.) His credentials proven, I felt I had no choice but to listen to the man.

When I go back at lunch tomorrow and buy the thing, let's all remember this fleeting moment of rationality.

Posted by Cody at January 30, 2007 9:27 PM