Curse you, Microsoft!

gkainz

gkainz

Final Approach
Joined
Feb 23, 2005
Messages
8,401
Location
Arvada, CO
Display Name
Display name:
Greg Kainz
Grrrrr, I HATE windows! Had a Win 10 heavy desktop/small server that I inherited and passed along to church for our security camera surveillance systems, since it had 2 2-port video cards installed and enough memory and cpu to handle managing the video. I wiped Oracle and all my stuff, brought it to church and before they integrated it into the domain, they did windows patches (no! no! no!) :) yeah, I get it - somebody has to patch sometime...

So, 2 of the video outputs quit, and the system defaulted to mirror display mode after patching. No amount of fussing could change anything on the displays. Rolling back to before patch fails with no valid restore point found. Great. Digging through the log files reveals memory errors so it appears that the updates failed there but succeeded enough that windows thought it was a success? Hmmm, ok, memory errors. But POST didn't show any memory errors. I handed it off to another guy who hates windows less than me to fuss with. He said he believed that the o/s was corrupted, so rebuilt it. He found indications of memory errors, so they ordered new RAM for it. Installed new RAM and had different errors. Reinstalled the O/S from scratch and patched up to point of failure, where it failed again. Finally (and I don't know or care where or how) found that a C++ driver was in conflict with the ATI video driver. Found an old ATI driver from a couple of years ago, reinstalled and the free PC is now functional again, after a week of frustration.

When I got the dirty look of foisting a piece of junk on them, all I could say was "it was working when I brought it in here!" and reminded them "there's no such thing as a free puppy."
 
Repeat enough times until you are a believer: "Computers are productivity improvement tools".
 
I'm writing this on an iMac, which I bought about six years ago because I was sick of Windows and the constant updates/headaches.

Unfortunately, we are stuck with Windoze boxes at work. PITA.
 
My church isn't rich enough to have Macs like some church's, but the computer I use for audio/video during our services was bought brand new a couple years ago, relatively high end. The only problems I've ever had is some bugs with the presentation software, and all of my computers at home are windows. I like both windows and apple's OS, but I have no problem with windows most of the time.
 
Matthew K said:
My church isn't rich enough to have Macs like some church's, but the computer I use for audio/video during our services was bought brand new a couple years ago, relatively high end. The only problems I've ever had is some bugs with the presentation software, and all of my computers at home are windows. I like both windows and apple's OS, but I have no problem with windows most of the time.
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As always, YMMV. I hate the constant "updates" from Windows. You'd think something based on Unix would be more stable. Apple has found a way.

Perhaps more hackers are attracted to Windows.
 
I'm on a macbook pro from work, which came about when their Dell Windows 7 Pro demanded a Win(h)8 update and the battery needed replacement. I convinced them to replace that battery with the macbook pro. Most of my work is remoting into Linux servers anyway, so it works for me. I've been in and out of Mac/Apple stuff since before IIci ... my first was a IIfx with ...hmmm, no idea what the Apple OS version was back then.
 
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gkainz said:
.hmmm, no idea what the Apple OS version was back then
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First Macs had a Xerox derived GUI OS that Jobs/Woz more or less stole as Xerox didn't have a clue of what to do with it. I've had Macs since 1984 when I got my first 128k. I'd have been out of business many years ago if I was running Windoze or DOS. :rolleyes:
 
With Windows everything is a PITA but you can get anything to work if you persevere long enough. With Apple most things are stupid easy, but everything else is completely impossible.
 
I just went through this yesterday. Tried to play one of my old CD based video games on Windows 7 and Windows wouldn't let it run. The problem was one of their updates disables the anti-piracy routine that verifies I own the game. You have to manually restart the routine by going to the command prompt etc. I have uninstalled the update but I understand with Windows 10 that's not an option. Yet another reason I won't move to 10.
 
Dana said:
With Windows everything is a PITA but you can get anything to work if you persevere long enough. With Apple most things are stupid easy, but everything else is completely impossible.
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This is exactly why I haven't abandoned the horrid evil that is Windows and gone to Apple.
 
You can no longer buy a copy of Microsoft Office, you have to pay for it annually, another ploy to generate revenue. I had to fork out $69 for this as they have crippled my 2007 version by removing the help file, and it will no longer do mail merge.
 
creweite said:
You can no longer buy a copy of Microsoft Office, you have to pay for it annually, another ploy to generate revenue. I had to fork out $69 for this as they have crippled my 2007 version by removing the help file, and it will no longer do mail merge.
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Open Office.

You’re welcome.
 
With Mac you can always open a terminal window and have BSD Unix, which means if you know Unix you can do darn near anything. But it's not for the UNIX ignorant. You can shoot your toes off in a hurry.

You used to be able to get to msot all of Windows by doing the same with a cmd window, but they've killed most of the underlying DOS leftover command line stuff since.

Later releases aren't as stable as they used to be but they still do a much better job of being backwards compatible with their old hardware.

Windows 10 with forced updates can be a painful deal. I bought a couple of Toshiba laptops (I've had good experience with Toshiba over the years). Windows 10 insisted on updating the touchpad driver to a version that wouldn't work. I could reinstall the old one (using a USB mouse) and it would work until the next boot or system update. I did find, by digging through Microsoft's Knowledge Base, a tool that can tell Windows 10 to not update some particular software which tided us over. But once you do that, you don't get any updates for that software.

These beasts are so complex that we've effectively lost control of them. And many (most?) users insist on the latest goodies which are built on the tottering foundation and continue the complexity.

I said years ago that we don't need to invent artificial intelligence-just learn to control it. How else would all the connected equipment know the most critical time/task to screw up? :D

John
 
Clark1961 said:
Open Office.

You’re welcome.
Click to expand...

Yeah, just don't expect to interchange complexly formatted files with MS Office. Of course I run into issues with that between Mac Office and Windows Office anyway.

I worked on an engineering team where some of us had MS Office and everyone had Open Office. There were a few members of the team which were died-in-wool ABMers. (Anything But Microsoft). We had to deliver documents in MS Office formats. One of these ABMers edited a requirements document I had created. From that point on, the middle 1/3 of the document believed it was in French and applied the spell correction accordingly. We were never able to determine why nor fix the document. We were finally forced to capture the text as ASCII and move it to a new document.

I'd say that was at least as big of a criticism of MS Office (if not more so) than Open Office, but it didn't really matter as we had to (by contract) deliver in MS Office format. So use Open Office (or google docs) but if you must interchange with MS Office, beware.

John
 
N659HB said:
There's an option to save Open Office files in MS format/extensions, IIRC.
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Yes there is. But some of the more complex formatting etc. MS keeps to themselves (or used to). It was reverse engineered for compatibility and didn't always work. Simple document work fine. Start adding in tables, pictures with wrapped text, headings, captions, auto tables of contents etc. and it's anybody's guess.
 
jsstevens said:
Yes there is. But some of the more complex formatting etc. MS keeps to themselves (or used to). It was reverse engineered for compatibility and didn't always work. Simple document work fine. Start adding in tables, pictures with wrapped text, headings, captions, auto tables of contents etc. and it's anybody's guess.
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Even inside Word graphics and captions tend to be wonky. At least it was back when I was producing reports.

Use office or open office. Don’t mix if it’s much more than a simple letter or spreadsheet. I looked at porting some of my more complex data processing routines to open office. I ran away screaming when I saw how open office addresses blocks of cells.
 
Clark1961 said:
Even inside Word graphics and captions tend to be wonky. At least it was back when I was producing reports.

Use office or open office. Don’t mix if it’s much more than a simple letter or spreadsheet. I looked at porting some of my more complex data processing routines to open office. I ran away screaming when I saw how open office addresses blocks of cells.
Click to expand...
:yeahthat:
 
azblackbird said:
I can run Windoze on my Mac most often better than on most PCs. Why not have the best of both worlds?
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I run Windows 7 as a VM on my Mac. That get's me MS Office for Windows compatibility for sure. Works pretty well most of the time. And I still have the Mac OS and underlying Unix to do programming stuff. At least i pretend I might do programming stuff. I'm CTO so I tell people I used to be an engineer, now I'm a technical kibitzer.
 
creweite said:
You can no longer buy a copy of Microsoft Office, you have to pay for it annually, another ploy to generate revenue. I had to fork out $69 for this as they have crippled my 2007 version by removing the help file, and it will no longer do mail merge.
Click to expand...

That's why I'm staying with my MS 2003. On some machines I've put Open Office.
 
jsstevens said:
I run Windows 7 as a VM on my Mac. That get's me MS Office for Windows compatibility for sure. Works pretty well most of the time. And I still have the Mac OS and underlying Unix to do programming stuff.
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Ditto... that's the beauty of the Mac. :thumbsup:
 
I use Open Office, and I recently found that it would not print an xlsx spreadsheet correctly (the text was garbled). I found a free Excel viewer on the Microsoft Web site, and that prints it correctly. (Unfortunately, that utility will be discontinued in April, so if you think you might need it, get it before then.)
 
Palmpilot said:
I use Open Office, and I recently found that it would not print an xlsx spreadsheet correctly (the text was garbled). I found a free Excel viewer on the Microsoft Web site, and that prints it correctly. (Unfortunately, that utility will be discontinued in April, so if you think you might need it, get it before then.)
Click to expand...
If you upload it to Google Drive then will Google Sheets be able to render it correctly?
 
Palmpilot said:
I use Open Office, and I recently found that it would not print an xlsx spreadsheet correctly (the text was garbled). I found a free Excel viewer on the Microsoft Web site, and that prints it correctly. (Unfortunately, that utility will be discontinued in April, so if you think you might need it, get it before then.)
Click to expand...
If you upload it to Google Drive then will Google Sheets be able to render it correctly?
 
azblackbird said:
First Macs had a Xerox derived GUI OS that Jobs/Woz more or less stole as Xerox didn't have a clue of what to do with it. I've had Macs since 1984 when I got my first 128k. I'd have been out of business many years ago if I was running Windoze or DOS. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I think Woz had already crashed his Bo (aviation!) and decreased his involvement with Apple by that time.
 
Oracle Virtual Box on my Mac for those times I have to run Windoze. When I ordered my macbook because of Windows 8, IT preinstalled Oracle VM and a windows distro ... guess which one?

Yep - Win(h)8 ... scoundrels!
 
asicer said:
I think Woz had already crashed his Bo (aviation!) and decreased his involvement with Apple by that time.
Click to expand...

I remember that, it wasn't long after he left Apple and things kinda went downhill for awhile. I even defected for a year or two and started running the Mac clones. :eek:
 
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