Posts by ABapple

Seagate dock hands: Tea, lads? Fewer hard disks than last year, eh...

Seagate reliablility history

I don't know what current Seagate drive reliability is but anecdotally over the past 15 years I have had some catastrophic failures from Seagate drives never WD. That being the case I will happily pay 1.5X more for a WD drive of same capacity since no warranty covers the time (and perhaps data) lost when a drive fails.

I have heard that newer WD drive also suffer from increased failure rates (especially drive electronics) so perhaps it is all just random luck.

What would get me to purchase a drive would be if it came packaged with a one click clone software package allowing me to precisely clone my existing boot drive onto the new drive. I know there are lots of clone packages out there but they all seem to have their problems. I can't be that hard to have software for one purpose only, namely to create an exact copy of the primary drive which will boot when installed into the computer. I know my IT department does it all the time.

Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month

samsung-apple-nokla

Apple's strength lies in range of smoothly working apps and consistent. OS and firmware support. I have a Nokia 71 and a Asus Nexus 7 tablet. Regardless of hardware my next phone will be an Apple pretty much regardless of moderate hardware differences.

Microsoft blasts PC makers: It's YOUR fault Windows 8 crash landed

End of XP support will force decision

I have two tower ATX boxes with Intel MBs from approx. 2006. No MB support (audio, LAN, etc) for Win 7 or 8. The hardware is solid and gets the job done with XP.

I probably will pick up a $39 Win 8 pro upgrade license for a lenovo laptop running Vista just to check it out.

On the desktops will I replace MB, MEM, CPU and some software in 2014? Probably cheaper to look at alternate OS. After 25 years might part ways with Microsoft.

As for the tablet wars $200 kindle or Google nexus tablets meet my needs. For many users that is the new price-point not $500-$700.

Nokia: Ship's now stable, all we need is passengers

Earlier Nokia smartphones poorly supported

I have a Nokia E series. It is about 4-5 years old and works well as a phone and a camera. Great hardware but pretty useless as a "smartphone". There was one software/firmware upgrade a few months after I purchased the phone. Nothing since. I understand the same happened with the N series. It is unlikely that the millions of orphaned Nokia users will purchase a Nokia product again. My wife purchased an iPhone at the same time I got the Nokia smartphone. The iPhone is still supported.