Posts by Daleos

Re: It works just fine for us

I also support a lot of less IT literate users. I get far fewer calls with Win 10 than I ever did with Win 7 or XP. BSODs and crashes are far, far fewer. Printers generally work

Still miffed about the telemetry situation and the constant updates are distracting. UWP is a failure, not because of the idea but because the apps created using it don't do enough. This is a developer problem, not an MS one. Biggest backward step for me is the Windows 10 start menu mostly because of its sluggishness and lack of old-school shortcut support.

Other than the moans above though, Windows 10 is way easier to support and use than Windows 7.

My biggest disappointment with Win 10 is not the new stuff but what they didn't fix from older OSs.

Why do we still have a 512 char max path length? What is search so crappy?

Why is UI scaling such a mess?

Still after all that, with my IT support hat on Win 10 is way easier to deal with than any previous Windows OS or Linux or Mac box.

As a user, I think Win 10 is better than previous versions. A lot of forward steps, a fair few backwards ones but overall ahead.

And I still prefer it to the 'straight jacket' Mac or 'greasy overall' Linux OSs for my main multiuse machine. Mac's are good for surface stuff and have one for tinkering around with music. Linux is my preferred back end OS or for something very specific but for getting shit done, its Windows all the way.

There are still some specialist SAS services around that rely on Silverlight. I often have to enable IE just so some clunky niche CRM can talk to Office 365 or Adobe Acrobat. These people doesn't actually use IE as a browser, it's there just so they can access those niche services. Besides, I don't know a single company that doesn't use multiple browsers for differen tasks.

I completely agree with you first sentence but not agreeing with many of your points under that.

Online storage is not cheap. Well it might be for small amounts of data but it gets expensive really quickly if you want larger amounts. And that not to mention online storage speeds. Even with a good FTTP connection, many consumer and small business level storage services are still really slow.

If you want more than a TB of fast online storage, you're going to have to dig deep and if you can find it, then I hope your internet bandwidth doesn't become a bottleneck..

The games drive on my desktop is heading towards 1TB (SSD) and my photos/home video drive (HDD) is far off that either. Backing 2TB to 'the cloud' cost far more than buying a NAS with a few TB of HDD storage. Plus if my PC dies, I've got the option of a bare metal restore. I don't know any online provider that can do a 2TB restore in any timeframe that I can work with.

5G isn't going to fix the internet, at least for a decade. If the rollout of 5G is anything like 4G, it'll take that long for it to be cheap enough for the general public to use it in the manner it's intended and even then the service providers will limit it in some way.

256GB is fine for documents, emails, the typical music library and a few photos. Want to store some home videos and play a load of games, you'll be struggling. Read Dead Redemption 2 for PC requires 150GB on it's own and I have no idea what a 4k home movie takes up but I bet it isn't tiny.

Here's to 2TB SSD drives at sub £100 prices. Until then, most of my archive stuff and backups are going to held on (multiple) HDDs

Re: £1,700 for a Surface Pro X

Yeah. ARM maybe is the future but as a SP3 owner, the SPX has too many minuses to make up for it's pluses. My SP3 (bought in 2104) is still going strong (the battery is still 93%) of the original so I've got a bit of use left in it yet so I'm probably looking at next year before I upgrade. When I do I'll be needing full application compatibility. It's very likely I'll stick with a 2in1 and therefore probably another Surface Pro. Whether it's the SP8 or the SPXv2 who knows. However, no chance I'll be paying £1700 for either.

What would interest me is a Go sized SPX though.

Re: Nobody wants to acknowledge

@Korev. Yeah. Same boat. Still on a 3930k machine after 6 or 7 years. Upgraded everything else twice since then. The only thing I'm missing out other than NVMe is USB 3C and that is not something worth having to replace MB/CPU/RAM for.

Re: Seems to me that FB and Google got caught with their hands in the cookie jar

"I'm now waiting for regulatory action: if both Google and Facebook did not make it 100% crystal clear that every action was visible when using this app (and in a VPN that really means a LOT), I think they deserve the maximum fine possible"

If the sources I read on this got it right, the "user's" were told that pretty much all their usage would be monitored. That was the deal for getting the money. What Apple are upset with is that this tracking data also logged stuff Apple didn't want it's competitors to know.

All fair enough in my opinion but then they shouldn't have released tools that allow others to see all this detail in the first place.

No sales figures but there's this Gartner report.

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-10-10-gartner-says-worldwide-pc-shipments-experienced-flat-growth-in-the-third-quarter-of-2018

Re: Bad user!

Yeah. That's exactly the reason you shouldn't use 'My Documents' to store your own files. If you want to keep thing neat and tidy, you don't want any old app bunging in their own files and folders in to your carefully crafted file tree.

Re: > "And Google technology is far more pervasive than Microsoft's ever was."

Apple is the one that gets away with it the most. When it's Apple is only allowing it's own apps it's an 'ecosystem' When anyone else gets close to being dominant, they get thumped down.

Re: And this is bad?

"Anyone else think UX peaked back around 2000 or so and has degraded slowly since?"

I think around 2010 is my sweetspot.

I really really hate all this new fad for whitespace. Google are the worst for this but the others are not far behind.

Re: Isn't it obvious

My Surface Pro 3 is still going strong after 3 years. It's the longest usage I've had out of any machine and it still looks new.

My first HP Elitebook 2730p lasted about 8 months before I had to RMA it. The replacement's keyboard fell apart after a another year and all the fake stainless steel finish peeled off. My Dell Latitude E4200 needed a replacement ssd after 18 months and always had a glitchy screen.

Anyway, my point being, my experience has been the Surface Pros are above par as far as QC and longevity are concerned. Sure there's been a few missteps along the way but my SP3 is still getting active support from MS and for that, I'll find it really disappointing if I have to go back to a provider that ditches firmware / driver support after about 18 months.

I'd love two Ethernet ports.

Be great for network testing/monitoring.

Might even be good enough as a home malware scanner/blocker

Re: Apple's history of bravery

I'm with you on most things but the WiFi thing. At work, I get more moans from Apple users about network connections than I do from PC users simply because most PCs have Ethernet built in and Macs often don't. Just because little Ms. Apple can use her Mac reasonably speedily on their home WiFi does not mean the same machine will work on a works wifi system with 20 other users.. Wifi bandwidth *IS* an issue when 20 users are all trying to save their Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere files to a server. There's just not enough spare capacity to cope with anything more than a couple of heavy users at any one time. Get a room full of them and things can and regularly do go wrong.

One of my clients has an office in a railway arch. They're all cool designers with all their inbuilt designer fear of wires. The trouble is, every time a train goes overhead, it totally fritzes the wifi signal so they are literally scared to save stuff to the server. Everybody (including the boss) would rather work on their own machines and wait for a quiet moment to save than fork out for ethernet connectors. Consequently, hardly anything is on the server and the whole workflow of the office suffers immensely.

Still, it means more work/money for me when they don't listen.

Re: Honestly how clueless a comment

I deal with both Google Apps, and O365 daily

Google Apps is okay. In fact, I use it for my own business. I'm okay with it's far from perfect. It just doesn't have many of the features enterprises and even SMEs often need. It's fine for soho's and up & coming SMEs but it just doesn't give you the customisability of MS Exchange so is often unsuitable for complex business structures.

Also, having just witnessed a company with 700 staff moving from in-house Unix server to a hybrid Exchange/O365 setup, it's my experience that Microsoft is eating up more old business structures than they losing it to Google/iCloud/whatever.

Google third party apps and extensions are great but just try managing loads of computers with no straightforward way to lock/block/approve or do mass updates/upgrades of extensions/apps. Also, the micro costs of the actually decent extension that bring it up to spec build up really quickly so the TCOs can easily spiral out of control.

Sure, if you're business has simple needs, then Google for work may be more than fine but as a sysadmin, I know which system gives me the least amount of work to do to keep everyone in the business on the same page and that's currently MS.

I think there's a big difference with what the user wants/needs and what the admins want/need. Google for Work for the user does about 90% of what O365 can do (but may do a lot of that 90% a little better) but from an admin side, Google apps is only 50% there if that.

As for PCs dead in the home? I wonder who buys all those PC games?

http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/83972-pc-games-sales-eclipse-value-console-games-sales-2016/

Also, since this time last year, Apple, Google & MS's stock prices have *ALL* GAINED by about 20%.

I'm afraid your Microsoft prophecy of death is merely wishful thinking. Try getting out more and seeing what people outside of your peer group are actually using.

Re: How much?

People tend to pick sides in this but lets face it... Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon...

Same meal, different sauce.

Re: Urban areas too?

10Mb is about all I could get in Shoreditch (apparently 'Tech City' and the epicentre of online businesses in the UK) before I gave up waiting for BT Infinity and went to Virgin. I feel dirty for doing it but BT are so hopeless it was the only option. If 10MB is all I can get in Shoreditch through BT I shudder to think what the rest of the country has to put up with.

IPhones don't have any security flaws...

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/product_id-15556/Apple-Iphone-Os.html

Re: Its a shame really

"Ok its not free, but lot of us have Tivo or Sky box which does PPV.

So the technology is pretty much in place. All that would be needed is for the films to be available at theatrical release time."

You have to pay Sky for a lot of other crud to get PPV so for it to work for me, the box needs to be free (or cost price) and then have the ability to PPV per movie, not per month or whatever subscription costs.

I can go weeks without watching the TV and a heavy week will be 3 hours of TV so I really pick what I want to watch. However, I'll happily pay the average price of a cinema ticket to see a movie at home on the day it's released. It would have to be without ads or other bullcrap though. The main reason I'm off TV is because I can't bear the interruptions.

Re: for those who said buying Motorola was all about the patents...

except I believer the majority of Google cheerleaders were expecting exactly that to happen.

I've yet to see a Motorola smartphone in the UK. Maybe they are still a household name in the US but in the UK, they're only famous for the Razr.

God no, that's worse.

Mint maybe but not the horror show that's Ubuntu.

Got to learn->support Win 8 for work so it got to stay on my one of my machines but it's going nowhere near my Windows 7 Desktop.

Re: Search as primary means of navigation?

Searching for apps can be done in Windows 7. it's the stupid tiles and lack/waste of space that's the issue with me. With Windows 7, there's enough space to display the whole program name (even in a 5cm wide menu) . In Win 8, you only get to see the first few chars worth of the app name. Take Photoshop for example. There's "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64bit)" and "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (32bit)" You can't tell which one is which on Windows 8 because there's not enough space to display the entire name.

Ironically, I have a bunch of 'search' programs that I have in a folder on Windows 7. They're all slightly different and depending on what I'm looking for I use a different app. On windows 7, I simply whiz down to 'All Programs' > tools > 'Text Search' or 'All Programs' > tools > 'Image Search' and there they all are, all with unrememberable names like astrogrep, sedawkgui, wingrep, etc. Alongside them are a few batch scripts for more complex searches. If I pick the wrong one, the alternative is next on the list. Try doing that with 'search'.

Also, Windows 8 doesn't let me have hierarchical structure so I whilst can group my tools into folders, I can't put folders within folders. In Windows 8, my various tools folders are all on the same level as my main apps folders. My apps finder screen now stretches to 30 odd pages which makes app location even more difficult, because it's forcing me to wade through all my apps, not just my search tools. Before they were all tucked away, out of sight until needed under 'Tools'.

Re: wise words

Except. Ubuntu Unity is also a complete dogs dinner. So much so, my home laptop is now running Mint.

(Main home desktop still on Windows 7 and have absolutely no intention of moving, work laptop on Windows 8 because I need to be able to teach other suckers who fell into the trap how to use it).

Re: On my final note

Which is exactly why I won't be buying Samsung. They've got way too much of the smartphone pie to be healthy for the rest of the business.

Re: What exactly is good about it?

In my experience HTC's support come out the best of all the Android manufacturers, update more of their older models and other than Nexus devices are generally the fastest to upgrade.

Chris D Rogers

Indeed. Many of my Mac owning designer friends are upset that Apple seem to be ignoring them after many, many years of devoted loyal service. Whilst there's still a way to go before they're likely to switch platform, perhaps this is the angle MS needs to claw back market share... Emphasize a professional OS for professional people. They should stop messing about in the consumer area and aim squarely at professional vertical markets, especially those in engineering and design.

Whatever happens, aside from high end gaming, the desktop will decline rapidly outside the workplace as consumers can now consume on anything. Better for MS to concentrate it's Windows OS on professionals who more likely than not will need a quality desktop and do something separate (I mean completely separate) for the plebs.

For a very long time, I've had Google's "Don't be evil" thrown into the same bullshit bucket as Apple's "It just works"

People don't think Google are 'nice'. Just because they had good intentions way back in the mists of time, when they were small and spritely doesn't mean they can continue with that wonderful thought now that they're a huge megacorp.

Basically, nice guys don't get the girls and this applies in business as much as real life.

Re: @ LarsG

I thought my Sensation was really slow after the 2nd ICS update but recently found a really simple fix.

Try disabling 'fast boot' (Settings > Power > Fast Boot) and reboot.

Re: So hang on..

It's maybe for ActiveSync to connect email apps to MS Exchange servers. MS also did a lot of research on multitouch (Surface 1 /PixelSense - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4hkSSlFYII ) way before Apple so there's maybe something amongst that lot too.

Nothing wrong with your comments but Apple and Facebook ought to be put in the same boat. All the major companies have cornered certain areas but cry monopoly when they try to move into a competitors field. It's just big business and always has been. The difference is, for some unknown reason, the general public (or at least the blogging public) are now taking sides. Big business has never been so 'personal'.