Posts by Legacymjr

The life and times of Surface, Microsoft's odds-defying fondleslab

Why do people keep saying change to Linux?

As an experiment every year or so I try out the latest version of Linux Mint as an alternative to Windows. This year all went well until I got to two things that my use case needs. The first is to properly use my HP 7520 all-in-one as I do a lot of scanning of both documents and photos. My short comment on this is that no sane person would be prepared to put in amount of work required to get this running even adequately compared to how it functions automatically under Windows. The second is getting my NAS box to connect and run. Sure you can do it but the effort involved! For people who just want to get things done Linux on the desktop is still a long way from usable I'm afraid. Also, to my surprise, for my small development needs these days it's easier to configure and run Python on Windows than on Linux Mint. Having said all that I am perfectly happy with Linux on the Raspberry Pi - a good use case I guess. By the way I am an old guy who last worked on proper Unix in the 1990's running large RDBMS, even then the front end was always Windows - easier to develop and looked nicer for the end user.

Is Britain really worse at 4G than Peru?

In the Pyrenees

Spent about 10 days in the eastern end of the Pyrenees last October. Amazed to find the broadband in the house supplied over a telephone line from across the mountain provided a perfect netlfix experience totally free of any buffering unlike my home fibre. Also on my travels both in France and Spain across the mountains that Google maps never lost the data signal at any time and this was really rural, unlike the M4 where I regularly lose the data signal!

Why 2014 might just be the year of the Google Chromebook

It's confusing out there

I am actually in the market for a replacement for my Samsung netbook that runs XP. I have read all of the comments on this and many other sites about Windows 8, many Linux variants and chromebooks and am still pretty confused. My current take is as follows:

Could go Apple but its very expensive and I dont want to learn a new ecosystem.

Linux is useless because of peripheral support or lack of it. I need to use a scanner for photos and cloud printing. I ran up Lubuntu which was fine then tried to set up my HP 7520 (which works perfectly under windows) - its a joke yes i got it working but its totally unstable and I cant scan. Enough said.

Chromebook is pretty good for printing (cant scan though) but it wont talk to my Raspbmc setup which has all of my media stuff on large NTFS drives. (Stopped using CD and DVD some years ago).

So in order to do what I want I am stuck with windows - can scan my photos and talk to my Raspbmc setup.

Is this right or am I missing something here?