
Re: I was gonna say...
The point is, it's a Pro. Field engineers often run offline copies of a live DB on pro-grade lappies, Apple or otherwise. This is not about 'only 8GB', it's about 'only 8GB on a Pro.'
558 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2010
So when Americans accidentally zap themselves to death by touching the pins while inserting a mains plug, we should... sue the govmt? Disclaimer: I live in the UK where this can't happen, but it doesn't make the US system inherently bad. You overstress a heavy-duty power rail in any system, it's gonna cause issues, and until these keyed plastic molex-style plugs remain standard in PCs and while GPU power demand spirals ever upward I do't see how you can stop stupidity. Yes I said it.
Had to wipe a customer's new HP Ryzen Win 11 box back to the metal after it started BSoD'd endlessly, even during attempts to factory reset. I have *never* seen this behaviour on any new machine and as a result, I now don't believe the only Ryzen issues are the slowdown that was reported due to off-balanced cores.
Call me Mr Pedantic (no, please, I like it) but that ain't Vista on that screen. It's Windows 7. Many internal designators in 7 still have the 'Vista' monika, yes, but look at the Start Button. Sorry, that's a Windows 7 orb in all it's fancy glory. The Vista bubble protrudes over the top of the taskbar by about a 5th. Do I win something? Some more meds would be cool.
Are you a Windows software engineer? I'm guessing not. Have you, like me, tested this on both 32 AND 64 bit? I'm guessing not. I said Windows 10 degrades *gracefully* - I never said it degrades well, or performs well. But it does perform, and MS appear to have made it deliberately scalable for deployment on headless systems such as PoS terminals etc (yes, haha I know what you'll say to that...)
Nope. Win 10 gracefully scales down to 1GB with no problems, disabling more and more system services as it goes. Don't get me wrong - I despise the bloat, and install classicshell on all my clients' machines, and switch background apps to off, etc etc - but the engineer in me is delighted by the under-the-bonnet work put in by the busy bees working at the coalface. Luckily, the monetization of Windows and the (largely cosmetic) bloat has no impact when installing on low-RAM devices.
So? Firstly, referencing the popular opinion of Vista as a failure is a disingenuous appeal to the masses. Secondly, Vista was clearly the harbinger of good things to come. Yes, it was initially badly broken. Yes, after two service packs it was still stodgy. But a fully patched Vista install contains the Win 7 driver model and much else from Win 7, and is pretty solid. Vista / Win 7 sharing the same DNA is a bad thing only in your worldview.
And what is wrong with Aero? Do you even know what Aero is? It is *not* solely the transparency effect that everyone supposes. It is a fundamental move to modelling the 2D traditional desktop using 3D GPU power, instead of using old, slow raster blitters, and is still very much fundamentally part of the Win 8 and 10 GUI.
Well, Windows 7 was bang on the money and has long taken over from XP as the 'gold standard'. In fact, the only two features from later versions that would make it better are Fast Start and Explorer's up-arrow (go to parent directory),
I think Apple engineers are bright enough to include reason codes in their event logs. Re-indexing due to a simple low battery condition would be dumber than a box of frogs. All laptops safely shut down when power is critically low to avoid borking the lithium cells. Well, dunno about Apple but Windows will force an emergency hibernation state when power < 2%, so when the tester fires it back up, no disk errors should have occurred.
This just sounds like poor battery management.
What if the user likes the Apple ecosystem, use a Mac and have spent years tailoring their feature set and the way they get everyday things done between desktop and phone? Are they supposed to stop complaining and break their workflow by buying outside their favourite ecosystem which otherwise does everything they need? Bit harsh, don't you think?
And you started off sounding so reasonable. Do ad-hominem attacks often help promulgate one's point of view? Not usually. You seem to be upset by any outrage leveled at Apple. Why so upset? Clearly there is a major usability gap here, and there is simply no denying it. I agree you didn't say 'Apple is Da Shitz so there', but you are very defensive toward them. I personally regard the lack of voice call and answer as an non-negotiable dealbreaker, and for the article author this is clearly the case.
I have worked in the disability tech field since the early eighties and am reasonably familiar with user requirements across many different disabilities. Most companies use disabled testers during usability testing including Microsoft. Why laud Apple in this way? If they got it wrong on such a major usability feature, why be so defensive? I don't understand.
This. I don't turn away business but when I get callouts to help 'rescue' iPads that 'helpful' family members have mis-configured for elderly relatives, I always groan. As long as Find My Phone isn't set up, no problem - I can do a factory reset with the button hold combo whilst connected to iTunes, but when I see the dreaded 'Please enter the password for the user abc....@icloud.com' it's usually game over and I tell the unhappy owner that they need to get the full login details from the family member who set it up. I then have to leave, unpaid (no fix no fee). I have literally had customers telling me it was set up by a relative who lives in Australia so they could Face Time them. And can they get these login details? No.
In my experience over the past year, the best route for 'difficult' systems was invariably:
1. Back up user data.
2. Install W7 + SP1 / W8.1 from scratch (or factory reset).
3. Visit MS main page and choose 'I want this POS called W10'.
4. Re-instate user data.
Side note: Freshly-reset W7 machines need at the least IE 11 or Chrome / FF. All academic now I guess, thankfully! But these tips will still work for the paid upgrade I reckon.
Hardly a constructive comment. What the article isn't making clear is that some surface tablets (mine included) can enter the Sleep of Death state when powered off. I have to use the emergency two-button reset to start my Surface Pro daily, after a full power-down. This only happens if the machine is off for more than a couple of hours, so in my mind it's clearly related. And I have given up looking for solutions. There are none.
...wow. Just... wow
In my professional life as a Windows support engineer who runs his own business, I am often asked my opinion about whether to get a Mac, and I try to answer in as balanced a way as possible - eg, I often say yes for various use cases. What I never do is start frothing at the mouth in pointless fury.
Slightly unfair comparison. In my experience a genuinely 'clean' install of Windows is pretty rare - it normally runs a buttload of 3rd-party crud which is what kills the CPU and fan. I should know; I spend my life fixing overheating turd-infested hardware (and no, not by installing Mint, though the gag is always appreciated).
Also, some internal Windows services are hideously sluggish and will kill your superfast gaming rig. Best example: Unless you access a hotmail.com or outlook.com account from within Outlook (any version) then you can safely disable the Windows Search service and notice an instant, massive decrease in fan noise. This service is useless to anyone who knows which folders they have put their stuff in.
You can also safely ditch the following: the two Homegroup services (seriously - who the hell uses Homegroup - and why?) and the Skype update service. Actually, you can rip out nearly any update service other than Google's and Windows' own.
Latest version of GWX Control Panel ought to do the trick. Haven't seen the GWX malware punch through it yet, though the author is sadly deferential to MS in his phraseology (both on his blog and in the language and choices available in the utility). I understand that as he has a relationship with MS (or with their staff) he doesn't want to burn his bridges, but when our best hope for barring this arrant filth is an MS-associated developer, we're really on planet la-la.
Disclaimer: WinX ain't so bad with ClassicShell. It's the GWX malware I really hate with a burning passion.
But I'm guessing the unspoken elephant in the room is that some of us might be using our phones / tablets to surf for free tuggables. And there is a veritable Aladdin's cave of dodgy MP4s out there, and anyone who wants to get their thang on is not going to be shielded by a click-to-play protection. Because no play == no funsies.
Icon because, ahem.
Surely this will be the long-awaited firmware update that brings Bookerly to 1st-gen Paperwhites? The article makes it sound sinister, but this update is long overdue so I'm guessing this is what it is. All my Kindle apps have Bookerly now so it would be great to finally get it on my Paperwhite.
Discalimer: I'm normally the guy sporting the tin-foil hat in the corner.
This changed my reflexive DV into an UV! Balanced and makes sense. I loves me Windows 7, and I've long said the X-Windows bottleneck can be problematic on Linux & Unix (may be out of date here tbh) but I like the ease of getting up'n'running with Mac software and configuring printers & such, so...
Can't speak for the other guy, but on my clean Surface, LibreOffice (which I love) has a sluggish UI and laggy loading speed - just generally feels clunky.
As I said, I love it but if you want to DV an honest observation based on opening and manipulating the same docs in Word 2010 to test compatibility, go fer it!