Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

Okay, my laptop has 3 gig of memory. Unfortunately, it also came with Vista. And while it's been slow anyway, I'm sick and tired of the endless boot and shutdown times, and the fact it seems to keep deciding to eat up all the memory and lock up Explorer even so I have to manually turn the damn thing off. Seriously, I had far less problems with my old Windows 98 computer.

Anybody know some good advice for tweaking Vista to suck less? I've tried google, which brings up lots of results, but lots are cosmetic changes, or haven't seen to have an effect. I've already scanned for viruses, I've got a spyware scanner. I guess defrag's the next step, but it takes so damn long, especially on huge modern hard drives.

And yes, "upgrade to Linux" is one solution, and I probably will dual-boot this beast eventually, but not yet.

Even moreso than the tightass paladin, the stereotypical character type that pisses me off in D&D? The "Chaotic Neutral" person who uses it as an excuse to be all "WHEE I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WITHOUT CARING." Or the people who think Chaotic Neutral = Psychopath. And the worse part is how so many of the official D&D books give that exact kind of stereotype in the descriptions of the alignments.

No. Just, no people. Come on. Chaotic Neutral is made up of two parts. The first is Chaotic, which means they don't care about laws. That DOESN'T mean they don't have at least some kind of their own code, or morals, or anything. It means they don't really care what society thinks. But it doesn't mean they're like Bizarro versions of lawful, who always have to break the laws, just because that was the law. They might flout the law when it suits them, and probably would, but they're not going to go running around and being crazy and breaking every law just because they can. Chaotic people have reasons, they're just reasons like "He looked at me funny" or "I was bored" or "I thought it'd be funny, did you see the Baron's face?" They don't have to be a jerk to everybody, or try and rip people off because only lawful tools pay for stuff. They just don't care what the regular law says, and do things because they want to.

Neutral's the other part. They're not good, but they're not really evil, either. Most of the time that gets used as an excuse like "Well you guys can't hate me, I'm not REALLY evil." Seriously, come on. Neutral means the person cares more about themself, but it doesn't mean they're completely selfish. They can have compassion, and friends they care about, but they can also be big jerks too. Like...most people, really.

So somebody who's Chaotic Neutral is going to put what they want before society and (most) other people, but they're still people and can put off doing things because of the consequences or because they'd feel bad about it or because it's too much work. They don't have to be crazy like the Joker or loony like a Toon. At least, not all the time. Because if you're always crazy, that gets predictable, and that's not really chaotic, now is it?

I wonder how many computers it would take to run the Internet if spam was gone. I don't get a lot of regular email, true, but the spam that gets by my yahoo email's filter almost always outnumbers the real emails I get by an order of magnitude. The problem is, spam's so cheap, all they need is one person to fall for the crap, and it pays for itself.

How many resources are wasted creating and sending and blocking spam? Lots. I hope that work at least grants some side benefits to the Internet.