> Sadly, M$ has managed to convince the general population that it is 
> "normal" for computers to not work propperly. If you bought a washing 
> machine and it didn't work properly, you'd take it back and demand a 
> refund. But when people buy a computer and the software on it doesn't 
> quite work properly, people just think this is "normal" and "acceptable". 
> This, truely, is M$'s contribution to the field of computer science.

Yeh you keep going on about how bad MS are, but I just don't see this.  Our 
whole company (as do many others) run on MS servers and MS run desktops.  We 
really don't see the level of problems you describe.  Last problem we had in 
the office was when IT installed a buggy print driver on the print server, 
it caused Word (well, any application that had print functionality) to crash 
randomly.  Of course everyone blamed MS, but then IT fixed the print driver 
and everything has been fine since.  I don't even remember the last time 
Word or any Office program crashed.

> I *was* going to sell my old CPU on ebay. I mean, it's a moderately old 
> now, but I paid about £250 for it when I got it.
>
> However, this was before I discovered that you can buy it new (exact same 
> model, clock speed, socket, everything) for £21.

Well at least you checked the price.  Some people just say "bought new for 
X, will sell for X/2", when in reality it's worth X/10 or 20.

> £21. Retail boxed. With a warranty.
>
> Who the hell is going to buy a second hand one?

You'd be surprised, second hand prices of computer components seem to sell 
at a fraction under the new price.  I guess there are a lot of people who 
are looking to save just a few £££s by getting second hand.  And it's not 
like most other things where they look old or don't work properly, a CPU is 
a CPU, it either works or it doesn't.

> Do you even remember when WinXP first came out? And how everybody has 
> utterly horrified at the minimum hardware requirements to make it function 
> acceptably? It's been around so long now that everybody seems to have 
> forgotten that XP takes four times as much hardware to do the same thing 
> as older OSes managed to do quite happily...

If it does the same thing, why are you using it?  Why does anyone use it if 
it does the same thing as previous versions?

> (And then there's the sad fact that M$ doesn't know the difference between 
> "operating system" and "entertainment system". Even in the "pro" version 
> of XP, you still get lots of silly toys like games and video players and 
> so forth that I have to spend ages uninstalling. Surely what most 
> businesses actually want is a tiny OS to run their *real* applications on 
> top of...)

Gee, I'd hate to work at your company where the IT people don't even let you 
watch videos or play an odd game of Internet Reversi during a break. 
Actually some of our customers send us video clips of problems sometimes, it 
would be a bit embarrassing if we had to explain how we chose an IT system 
that didn't allow us to watch them...

People also use WinXP Pro at home you know, I think everyone in my family 
and even my gf on her laptop has the Pro edition.

Post a reply to this message