Rant: Microsoft

[Molly]

Hubby and I broke down and finally purchased a new computer several months ago. Both his nephew and my nephew told us to purchase one w/Windows 7. They said Windows 8 is designed more for smart phones than computers.

[cardinalkarp]

Hubby and I broke down and finally purchased a new computer several months ago. Both his nephew and my nephew told us to purchase one w/Windows 7. They said Windows 8 is designed more for smart phones than computers.

I was just talking w/ a computer place (because of a external hard drive issue) and our current laptop has Windows 7 and he suggested to keep that thing as long as it lives because Windows 8 is a POS.

[jim]

It will live for a while but ...

http://www.cnet.com/news/windows-7-support-ends-today/

The issue is trying to find a laptop with 7 on it. I would have picked the 7 over 8 if I could have found it, but in the price range I was looking (~$200-$250) the only options were Windows 8.

[cardinalkarp]

Speaking of computers....and the computer place who was looking at my external hard drive (which seemed to have crashed). My wife uses the EHD to store all of our pictures on and out of no where the thing just started acting up. We'd power it on and it would look like everything was ok, only to plug it into the laptop and the status light on it would go from blue (good) to red (bad). The drive itself wouldn't show up as an external device on the computer either so being computer illiterate my only real option was to bring it to a computer store that had helped us recover some data from a hard drive when our old laptop crashed.

The guy was nice enough to come by our house to check it out and of course to no surprise of my own, it did the same thing....which left him a little puzzled. We took the drive out of it's casing and he took it w/ him because he said he was going to try and plug it directly into his computer back at his home & at his store the next day.

He called me shortly thereafter saying that he was having no luck on his computer either, but would give it a shot at his store to which again he had no luck. He told me it was pretty much DOA (and that he couldn't even hear it trying to power up and run), and that recovering anything off of a EHD is a very expensive process (which we weren't willing to do) and asked if i wanted to pick it up or just have it disposed of.

I figured that I would still grab it and call the manufacture themselves to see if they had any clue what could be the issue (it is well out of warranty), but it was too late last night so I figured I mess w/ it even though I had no clue what I was doing. Tried a few different things and still nothing, and then when trying to run something my antivirus software says it found some type of major virus (possibly in the hard drive itself??) so i clicked on some buttons in hopes that might do something......and nothing.

So what do i do, i decided to give the thing a couple of good whacks and the mother f'er powers up and starts working perfectly. F'ing computers.

[Radbird]

Show the guy at the computer store that you fixed it and tell him if he ever needs help you're available for consultations.

[Molly]

So what do i do, i decided to give the thing a couple of good whacks and the mother f'er powers up and starts working perfectly. F'ing computers.

Proof positive that sometimes the ole "Give it a good whack!" really does work

[cardinalkarp]

Show the guy at the computer store that you fixed it and tell him if he ever needs help you're available for consultations.

That might work until he witnessed my method of "fixing".

I called him back today and told him I wanted 1/2 my money back.....since there is a charge just to look at the stupid thing.

[GeddyWrox]

This statement might bring out some hateraid, but I think one of the things MS is actually getting right is SQL Server. They have made HUGE improvements in their database offering. Now, they're going to f that all up by adopting a much different licensing scheme, but as of now, SQL Server competes very well against Oracle as far as performance goes.

And FWIW, I hate Win 8 too. I bought a mini-tower for family use about 6 months ago and made sure I got one with Win 7. I think 8.1 fixed some of the major complaints people were having with 8, but it's still stupid. They had a fairly decent OS with 7 (Jim would probably disagree), and went and F'd it all up.

[jim]

I really do disagree that 7 was decent. It was prone to viruses, adware, and bloated. Constant patches pushed out that were obnoxious to install. Windows 7 is a toy at best.

As far as databases go, Postgres is a solid choice. One of the applications I am responsible for has a 150 GB Postgres database - so not Facebook but no toy either. We are inserting about 30k records per hour non-stop. We also roll old and uninteresting data off, so there is a scrape process happening as well. We hit it hard, and it barely breaks a sweat.

I would not consider any Microsoft product for any real software project. It really can't even handle home use very well. I also would not consider Oracle either, another bloated (even more so that MS) and expensive (even more so than MS) pos.

I confess that I have a very strong pro open source bias, mainly because the stuff works better.

[GeddyWrox]

I hear you, Jim. I guess my take on Win 7 is highly based off of my experiences with 95/98/Me/XP/Vista. 7 blew those out of the water. I have never done anything with Linux/Unix other than watch someone else demo it a little.

As far as SQL Server goes, my last several clients were up into the several-TBs-worth-of-data level, and it handled everything fine. MS also has an MPP Data Warehousing appliance out now called PDW that is built off of SQL Server, and it can handle up to 7 PETABYTES of data, depending on hardware/licensing configurations. Impressive stuff. But yes, there are other options out there. Even in the big data arena. (I hate the term big data, btw -- side rant)