Tag: Windows 7

A burning hatred for Microsoft Windows

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So I get home, open my ‘new’ Dell E6420 and I get dunned about Windows updates. I postpone for four hours. But then the machine decides to reboot into the updates some 20 minutes later.  But phase 1 of 3 took, in my opinion too long. So I shut the machine down via holding down the power button.

It booted and went right to phase 3 of 3. Even that was fucking klunky. I had to shut down again, the third try was the charm.

When I finally get to logon I get the reminder there are 24 updates available. This time of course it showed me what they were. Bunch of security updates.

But Linux and in particular Ubuntu – when it has updates you have to approve in essence. And it tells you PRECISELY what’s being installed. And in fact updates to software is pretty frequent on Linux. Windows is every few weeks. But not all updates require rebooting.

It’d be pretty easy for me to make the switch. I have an SSD with Ubuntu 14.04 on it. I should just snap it in and say fuck Windows forever.

Unbelievable lifespan for a computer

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So one finally bit the dust tonight. Old Dell XPS M140’s. By reckoning those machines were 9 years old. But the conundrum – if it could be called that is when the last one failed this evening I have no way of getting data off the machine. Or so you might think.

Since they’re vintage computers they use ATA-100 drives. So I got an ATA-100 to USB converter. Just plug it in and turn it on. Ordered a refubished Dell Latitude E6420 to replace the old machine. Cost about $300 with tax. I’m picking it up tomorrow. I got it from MicroCenter.  A warning, their site doesn’t play well with Chrome or Firefox – you have to use Internet Exploder/Explorer.

But the reason the machines lasted so long is that yours truly did a hell of a lot of preventive maintenance. Just to give you an idea, at age 4 I replaced the hard drives on them. And I can’t count the number of keyboards I replaced on them. Or the screens I replaced. In fact the only thing original on the machines were the motherboards. Oh yeah, wifi cards got replaced too.

In essence I get my moneysworth out of computers. But this upgrade is sort of necessary as the ‘new’ machine is Windows 7 Professional which will upgrade to Windows 10 with no issues.

So Once again with Microsoft Visual Studio

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This time it’s Visual Studio 2012. Comes with C++, C# and VisualBASIC. Hmm – I had picked up a cheap learn C# book. I already have more than a passing familiarity with C++ and C and C# (Pronounced C Sharp) isn’t that much different except it’s Microsoft’s version of C++.

As such it has limitations. One of the best features of C++ is object oriented programming. Inherent in that is the fact that the object you create can have what is called polymorphism and inheritance and attendant overloading of methods.

In C++ you’re pretty much unlimited to overloaded methods. But in Microsoft’s fucking wisdom, you get by one in C#. One. Are they serious?

I can sort of understand why they’d do this, as overloading methods can get to be a little hairy with memory management but that’s always been the trade-off in higher level programming languages.

I should mention, most of the code base of Window 7 and Windows 8 are written in, you guessed it, C#.

But I do find it interesting that Microsoft still bundles C++ in there. As a reference point I believe Windows XP was written in C++ which may account for some of the limitations of the operating system and the lack of the new Windows filesystem. But there’s still a hell of a lot of XP machines out there. Particularly in government settings.

Fixing ancient laptops

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I’ve had this laptop for a long time. I’ve done preventative maintenance on it and repairs where necessary.

One of the things that drove my nuts about it was the screen hinges. The things were just worn down, the screen would flop any which way.

Searched the web and found a new set of hinges for $10. It took the removal of 12 screws to do this, the ones on the screen surround, and the screws holding the hinges to the rear of the display cover and those that secure the screen to the chassis of the machine.

And as I’ve said – I understand the limitation of XP and 32 bit architecture. But it still does what I need it to do without any major issues. And I was of the firm impression that Vista was a piece of crap, Windows 7 was acceptable but unnecessary to upgrade to that as it was a bit bloated, and Windows 8 looks like it was designed by a crack addled ADHD sufferer. And that’s me being nice about it. In my opinion XP was the pinnacle for Microsoft. And it’s been down hill every since.

What Microsoft doesn’t realize is this:

1) An operating system has a very LONG life span. And just shoveling new OS’s out there that in essence were half baked pissed a lot of people off.

2) The cycle for I.T. infrastructure isn’t two years, it’s more like 4-7 years.

It is entirely likely that my next computer will not run Windows. Or at least not as the default operating system. Instead I’ll probably get use Debian Linux and VirtualBox on it. VirtualBox is a virtualization package that lets you run another OS image underneath the main OS. So I’ll just clone my current XP box into an image and use that when I need to get access to MS Office, etc.

And I will kiss goodbye forever Microsoft’s craptastic operating systems. Yes I said it, I’ve dealt with Windows for over 20 years now and all I can say is that it’s been one pain in the ass after another. From print drivers that no longer work with the latest versions of Windows, to bad file system structure, etc.

Linux at the very least is flexible as hell. The ext4 file system can have drives up to one exbibyte (EiB). That’s that EiB is 1 exbibyte = 260 bytes = 1152921504606846976bytes = 1,024 pebibytes. A pebibyte is is 250 bytes. And right now we’re only seeing terabytes and gigabytes. So there won’t be any problem with big files in the ext4 file system.

Plus ext partitions have journaling capabilities, error correction, etc. Compare that to the Windows File System.

I can just use Macrium Reflect to create the boot image of this machine – and BAM! Virtualized in style.

So I’ll be leaving Microsoft for greener fields. And in fact once I image this machine I’ll probably put Ubuntu or Debian on it. It’s still usable.