Oct 0809
I’m in Technology Hell
October 9th, 2008
My laptop is being rebuilt, my cell phone has stopped ringing — but all my equipment is new! I’m in technology hell, and if it weren’t for Maki and my senior network administrator, I would lose my mind.
When I ordered a new laptop three months ago, I asked for Vista as my operating system. I figured it was time to get Vista; it’s been out for ages and resistance is futile, it was time to upgrade. Alas, my brand new Sony VAIO laptop with 2 GIG of RAM was slooooow to boot up and slow to shut down, it took 5-10 minutes to recognize an ethernet or wireless connection, it crashed a lot, and hibernating almost never worked.
Maki finally got sick of my whining and asked me to hand over my laptop one day so that the network admins could downgrade my OS to XP. Wow,my laptop is now super speedy and I’m online within seconds after plugging in. I’m still in hell because you know how it goes with a new system: you have to re-install all your favorite plug-ins, you need to set-up your Word templates, you have to re-synch your phone with your Palm desktop, yada, yada.
Now for my phone. My beloved Palm Treo suddenly stopped working in August. It kept trying to synch with my laptop, even when it wasn’t connected to my laptop and it would crash often. So I got the latest Palm phone, which I love. It’s lightweight, it synchs with my laptop nicely, and I love the built-in apps. Trouble is, the phone mysteriously stopped ringing. No, I didn’t drop it on the ground or in water. It still vibrates, it’s just won’t ring. I guess I’ll have to make a trip to the Verizon store where I will wait in line for an hour for the privilege of being poorly treated by a snarky sales rep.
I’m lucky. Maki is an absolute wizard with hardware and he can make anything work. At work, I have HT, who has the patience of Job and the skills of a Jedi. I ask myself how people who don’t have network admins working for them deal with all these crazy technology issues. Do they buy Macs?
October 10th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Sounds familiar—our company (about 1000 employees) is rolling out new hardware to everyone this month—and our IT folks have decided to stay with XP.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am
I didn’t know what to expect from Vista. I had heard some horror stories, but a couple of my staff members love it, so I said okay, I’m ready. Needless to say, I was disappointed at the performance and didn’t make the decision to go back to XP lightly because of the hassle.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Macs aren’t always better: Less than a year after purchasing my first Macbook, my hard drive crashed for no reason—one week before my Master’s thesis was due. I’m also on my third iPod in one year because they too keep crashing. The Mac geniuses at the Mac store was wonderfully patient, kind and efficient, so I can’t complain too much, but I admit to being less dazzled by the “Mac experience” now.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Grammar alert! I meant: “The Mac geniuses at the Mac store ARE wonderfully patient…”
October 10th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I agree that Macs aren’t always better. I have a first generation PowerPC Mac (that I love) and it overheats from time to time and just turns itself off. I have a Mac at home for personal and mommy activities, and use a Windows laptop for work. I feel like I have the best of both worlds by having both systems. No, I don’t have Windows on my Mac; I got a Mac to have the Mac experience. :-) I love iLife, but I also love the open source apps that are available for my PC laptop.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I’m a mac user but I do at home have 2 vista machines. One is a desktop that I use to test out things and I have to say vista stock was slow BUT I spent a good hour disabling all the services I never use in the first place and that fixed my slowness. There are a lot of background processes running in stock vista like full-text indexing (microsoft’s shot at spotlight). Where I have to say on my Powerbook when I upgraded to the first OS X that had spotlight it took a good 45 minutes to 1hr until the mac became responsive again (it indexed all of the 70Gb of data on the disk).
Now a big issue with vista is it constantly indexes and optimizes the system when it detects idle time. Now on my girlfriends vista laptop I had advanced to actually finding this website: http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html
My 2 vista machines now run faster than when they had XP running + I have less headaches especially because my girlfriend managed to blow up her laptop after 3 month (and she’s been on vista for 6 month now with no problems). Then again I figured out a way for the DC Police Fleet to run XP on their AMD K6-350mhz machines by removing every single component but the software they needed for doing the computer aided dispatch.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:54 am
A friend of mine introduced me to Swikle. Swikle is a mobile utility that securely stores your mobile content so you never lose any personal data. It stores all contacts, pictures, music, ringtones, etc. stored on your mobile device. If you lose your phone or simply upgrade to a new one, you can retrieve all the data you’ve accumulated to your new device.
You can set it up to automatically send any update to your profile to your friends and family. You can also receive automatic updates from your friends and family when they update their profile (e.g. new email address or business phone number when they change jobs).
Check it out. http://www.swikle.com/#loadSignInIndex
October 20th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Apple is using the Vista issues to it’s advantage. Check out the new Mac commercial. http://thedenveregotist.com/article/2896/apple-bean-counter