Thursday, March 18, 2010

Can anyone tell me why in the hell MS Vista and Win 7 are giving me such issues?

I tell you, every time I have to use my IBM Tablet with Win 7 or my HP Desktop that sits in the basement running Vista or the HP laptop in the family room, I feel like I'm going to have a STROKE. If they're not rebooting to update, then they're losing printer drivers (I have an HP Laserjet 1018 and a HP Photosmart 7960 hooked up to the desktop and I can't tell you how many times I've had to re-install the drivers), or the systems stop sharing files and printers altogether. And if that Adobe Flash product asks me JUST ONE MORE TIME to update and then reboot, I'll just uninstall it altogether. Come on HTML 5!!


The reason this came up is because I just got home from class and the basement PC has three out of four cores running at 80%. Know what's running on the taskbar? NOTHING! WTF??!!?? I tried to go to the task manager -- no go -- then the Start button -- no dice. Screw it -- I laid on the power button until it shut down. I didn't bother bringing it back up.


Now, I'm a technical sort so none of this should bother me, it should be kinda fun tweaking around the innards of Windows. But NO MORE -- could it be that I'm becoming crotchety in my old age? Nope. It's the just intolerable experience that has become Windows versus the Mac environment I've been using these past few months. Thought I'd never hear myself say that, but, well, there it is.


Since using a MacBook Pro for several months, I think I've rebooted my MacBook probably three times (I think one was an OS upgrade and one was a recent Safari upgrade and I don't remember the third), and every piece of software on it (except a Microsoft product go figure) works without fail.


One of my classmates has Mac Office 2008 and it worked flawlessly with the Windows Office 2007 presentation that we were creating, including the advanced SmartArt. Because of that, I bought Office 2008 and I can stop using the Parallels Desktop app just to run Office (well, except for the occasional foray into OneNote). I find the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps in the Mac version to be outstanding like the Office 2007 for Windows version (except they haven't crashed, not even once so far). Entourage (the Outlook for Mac), on the other hand, has crashed a couple of times per day as I've tried to use it. I've gone back to using OS X's built-in Mail App, and I found that it supports add-ins so I've loaded a few of those to tailor the environment to my liking.


Anyway, the basement system is only about 6 months old, so I don't know what gives. Maybe I'll look at it this weekend when I have time; maybe I'll just go buy a Mac Mini to replace it and sell it since it's only running as a system to back up files from the other computers in the house and is hooked to the home theater for Hulu anyway.....


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