Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

[Fats]

typically much more restrictive than the keyboard bottleneck (rate of precision typing)

And then that is still not the fastest way to type. I do remember when live subtitliing was introduced on the Holland television. These people were trained to use a keyboard to input syllables and not single letters and also it was done by pressing combinations of keys at the same time.

greets,
Staf.

[Fats]

@Smerf
There will likely be a significant number of desktops for a decade or two, but their ultimate demise is pretty much certain.

Like the car would lead to the demise of the bike, the television to the demise of the radio etc.
I think they will coexists or it will become a hybrid of both.
Take a tablet placed on a foot and handled by a bluetooth mouse and keyboard with a more conventional WIMP interface. Would that be a desktop machine or a tablet ? I would say it is both.

greets,
Staf.

[SysAdmin]

Vista is like a high maintenance girlfriend who is also very ugly, why bother?

[Iggy]

Vista is like a high maintenance girlfriend who is also very ugly, why bother?

What significant differences do you see in Win7?
Split screens?

[Iggy]

I only run Windows virtually here at home and that seems to work
I do know at my work they spend considerable effort to switch from XP2 SP2 to Vista but in the end backtracked and stayed at XP as they could never get the Vista environment problem free.

greets,
Staf.

Funny, I'm running it right now and I don't have any problems (at least none that also don't surface in Win7).

[Duce]

My hardware is state of the art, and I've been a MCSE/MCSA for over 10 years.  I'm not clueless in the least with MS software.  It's not a hardware issue, isn't not a 3rd party of poorly cfg'ed software issue, lol.  I built machines and did IT support for many years.  It's a Microsoft issue in which Vista is crap, and it's well documented.  Vista was not a financial failure by any sane stretch - but it did earn MS their first financial Q loss in 23 years.  It's in the list of the 10 biggest tech failures of the last decade for a reason - it was widely seen as a train wreck.  Peoples standards are different, I guess - that's good by me, and certainly some people were happy with Vista.  Check how many Windows 7 downgrade to Vista programs vs. Windows Vista downgrade to Windows XP were offered, and how many people took the optional downgrade to Vista from 7 vs. Vista to XP  Vista was widely seen as a step back, it offered very little over XP, and the adoption rates were absolutely horrible compared to other OS releases, past or present for MSFT.

SP's have done a lot for Vista, but it's still garbage compared to 7.  And I never liked XP all that much to begin with, but Vista was a step back.
If you count UAC in the way it was implemented at first as a "security buff", wow - people turned that crap off the minute they could.  Was the most intrusive thing ever.  Unintuitive, bloatware "protect me from myself" crap.  Vista now is to MS in 3 short years what MS Bob took them 10 years to add to the "big mistake" list, lol.  

The fact the entire machine could be brought down by a driver crash means nothing with Vista?  I'm a big gamer - Vista was a train wreck for us guys with that.  Gfx driver crashes, the machine needs a hard reboot.
Was fixed in 7, you will note.  Having any driver take a machine out of commission rather than have a recoverable driver system is bad, bad, bad.
XP was under a similar stack regarding drivers, but never ever had half the issues that Vista did.

Install Vista on a PC.  Test drive it.  Hell, Install XP after that.  Vista will be dog slow compared to XP even, where as 7 if anything is faster on equal HW than XP.

Install 7 on the same PC a week later.  You will find Vista to be garbage in comparison if you use the machine for anything other than puttering around with email.  For people like that, it could be Win 98 and they wouldn't know the difference.  If you are the type that simply putzes around on PC's for email and not much more, anything will work.  It doesn't for me, I'm hooped without stability - and yes, I know the glaring irony in using the term "stability" in conjunction with the term "Microsoft Windows"  

Comic I always liked, and I'm no Mac fanboy by any means:

http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/915.html

[smerf]

Thanks for that Smerf you made me chuckle. If we Macintosh users have to be the outlet for your little rants then so be it. I have broad enough shoulders for it

Oh and I am a windows and linux user too.

Hi,

@CritAnime and all "Mac" users

Happy I made someone happy, anywhoo, today in the shop where I work, one of the guys brought in an duo core iMac, wanted to know if anyone could fix it, now you are looking at a bunch of high tech idiots that repair some really wild electronic gear, but we all use PC's, either laptops or desktops, well he asked me first I looked at this white smooth modern day looking object and said Hmmmm an iMac, well the first thing we have to do is look for the on / off switch, well it wasn't on the classy looking keyboard, it wasn't on the front of this ultra smooth classy shiny monitor with a slot in the right hand side, so I took a wild guess and looked in the back, viola an on / off button on the back left hand side. My sweaty hands reached back there and pushed it and the screen lit up, we waited 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds (getting boring isn't it) 2 minutes, then a folder with a question mark came to the center of the screen. I looked at the guy who brought it in, and said is that it, he answered that's all it does. Not knowing what to do next since I own a PC, I said do you have the operators manual, he said yep, here it is.  The op manual said to press certain keys if this folder kept popping up, well I pressed those keys at least 25 times and the same folder with a question mark kept popping up. He asked me well, I looked at him and said "It's Broke".

We then contacted our best PC tech in the house, just before quitting time he came down and looked at it.  We all sat anxiously by, since this was the first iMac we have ever seen, and touched. He looked at it with those eyes of wisdom, turned it on after finding the on / off switch, watched that deadly folder. He then asked for the book, looked at it and said what you have here son is a real friggin hardware problem. I suggest that you call this number in the back of the book and ask for Apple tech support, tonight, and tomorrow I will take a closer look at it, sure is a beauty, awful sexy looking machine, something like my wife, awful good lookin but don't work.

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@Duce,

I use Windows Vista on my latest greatest PC game machine, does all right now, but the trouble with micrsoft is if you do a lot of updating to your equipment you get the keycode not valid syndrome, where you have to call some person in India, who talks with a weird accent (probably he thinks the same) and you try to tell him it is the same computer, only updated, this happended when I went from a quad core to a six core cpu, when I went from 4 gig to 8 gig of memory, when I changed hard drives from 250 gig to 1 terrabyte and when I changed my graphics card.

I don't think Microsoft expects you to update your computer, then when you do you have to revalidate, and after the third time you have to explain to those idiots, that it is the same computer only updated.

By the way after the third time,they want you to purchase a new keycode.

Thats why I am holding off from updating my other quad core computer, it is getting quite old (4 years) but really don't feel like going through the hassle with windows 7.

Why can't the game companies make games for Linux, this is the only reason I still use windows.

Linux the best OS after Amiga OS.  

I don't need no stinkin Mac

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@Transition,

[Vista is like a high maintenance girlfriend who is also very ugly, why bother?]

Well just like a high maintenance girlfriend, some people just can't afford to purchase another copy of Windows, and are forced to use what they have.

but just like a high maintenance girlfriend,

You can turn her upside down, step on her nose, and turn her into a water fountain.

smerf

[Duce]

Apple hasn't had a white plastic/polycarbonate iMac since August 2007, and they weren't particularly hard to work on.  All iMac's since then have been the aluminum (silver) bodied ones.  While said machine may have looked cutting edge, it's a 5 year old machine.  The Core2 plastic cased models were known for some display issues and banding on certain models, which was fixed with a software update.  I do fully agree though, none of the more modern iMac's are much fun to work on, especially compared to something like a simple tower PC case.

As for Windows key re-activation, I have had the same go around with MS in regards to switching licenses.  They have got better over the years, but it's still a complete PITA.  I remember doing it with a Vista license a few years ago and being stuck on hold for the better part of an hour, but recently I did it with a copy of Win 7 and was done with it within 5 minutes.

The fact they have outsourced everything like that to India and such is the biggest pain, as you said, Smerf.  But I guess that's happened at a lot of places providing support - Dell was the worst I ever encountered years back for that.

[stefcep2]

@Duce.

Clearly Vista hasn't worked for you.

But I'm curious as to which Vista beast you used.  I can't prove it but my experience with a massive number of PC's ie the one desktop and two laptops I have at home suggest that Vista Business is leaner, meaner, faster and more stable than Vista Home premium.  It lacks Mediacentre so I'm sure this has something to do with it.

 I dual boot the desktop a 2007 vintage Athlon X2 5000 with 2 gb RAM with Vista Business and XP and the performance difference is marginal.  My son has a core2duo laptop with 2 gig ram again about 4 years old.

 I set up a dual boot with XP Pro and Vista Business for him, but again, XP' s was marginally quicker.  We took XP off it since there was no compelling reason to keep it.

The one noticeable thing is that Vista seems to thrash the hard drive more than XP and Win 7.  But IMO it is the best looking OS Microsoft has ever produced.

One thing I credit Vista for is that it has changed in a fundamental the way people use their PC:  most users (not so much fanatics or geeks) I see no longer bother with launching and finding items pinned to the start menu, or opening window after window but rather Start-->Search-->type a few letters, and indexing does the rest.  This is quite a paradigm shift and is not lost on Microsoft, where it intends to have this as one of two ways to navigate Win 8.  You don't need to know the file system layout, just some of the name of what you want, and there it is.  Every bit as big an innovation as the Start button was in 1995.

[Duce]

Vista worked, and worked well enough to use on my daily driver PC's after SP's arrived.  Entirely usable for the most part, but in comparison to 7 still a complete pig to me.  If all a person had ever used was Vista, one would be none the wiser.  I've installed Vista on a machine, run it for a week, then thrown 7 on the same machine and the difference to me is incredible, even with older hardware.  Boot times with 7 are significantly better, among other things.  7 is actually quite pleasant to use on a system with a SSD - my gaming PC boots up as fast as my SAM 440, and that says a lot.

Used all variations of it, 32 and 64 bit.  Tbh, not sure I ever used the search functions of Vista or 7 much.  I'm a bit particular about how I do things I suppose, and fell into habits 20 years ago I still use today, heh.  I use the Start Menu and quick launch functions almost exclusively when mousing around, but for the most part I just have programs bound to G keys on my systems.

[persia]

MS Windows is ok if you like doing everything in the GUI, but if you really want to do something in a terminal/command line you need a Mac or Linux/BSD box.

[Iggy]

...if you really want to do something in a terminal/command line you need a Mac...

:roflmao:

Now that IS funny!

Windows grows out of a CLI based OS (MS-DOS), but Apple Mac's (which have always been GUI based) are the choice for command lines.

BTW - Glad to see a few other Vista users here. Win7 has completely underwhelmed me.

[TheBilgeRat]

:roflmao:

Now that IS funny!

Windows grows out of a CLI based OS (MS-DOS), but Apple Mac's (which have always been GUI based) are the choice for command lines.

BTW - Glad to see a few other Vista users here. Win7 has completely underwhelmed me.

Mac is BSD.  Why is that funny?  The only work I can't get done on my mac is XNA development.  Windows has a similar issue with iphone development.  I just wish it was as easy to get hackintoshes running as it is to dual boot windows on a mac.  My win 7 install has been the best windows experience I have had to date.  Vista was mediocre, the 64 bit version was buggy, and my machine was quickly reverted to XP.

BUT, like i tell all my friends, upgrading for the sake of upgrading is stupid.  If the system as it stands does exactly what you need, then that is the right system.

If an OS3.x machine(or system 7...I liked me some macOS) ran java, python, eclipse, visual studio, and xcode and did it in "realtime" I would need nothing else.

[Iggy]

Mac is BSD.  Why is that funny?

Because Mac IS BSD NOW.
Its kind of like jacking up a car and driving a new one underneath it.
Exactly what about Macs has any relationship to its origins?
Three ISAs, multiple radical OS changes, definitely your Grandfathers axe.