Rant: Microsoft

[Arthur Dent]

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.

My experience with Linux patches is there are a million as well and the probability of catastrophic failure when installing them is much larger. In large part because of exactly this sort of issue, I avoid messing with Linux for home computers. The probability that a round of updates will work without some kind of severe problems is maybe like 25% for me.

I wouldn't say that Windows 7 is great or anything, but its kind of good enough, at least for home use, that I don't care that much.

[jim]

Mac's are Linux underneath and they make all of that admin stuff painless. I really do like my MacOS. It gives me all of that glitzy stuff but I can pop the hood on it and it's so familiar.

As far as the patches, I just can't tell you how annoying it was to pack for work at 5:00pm and go to shut down only to find out that patches that take 30 minutes to download and install were pushed out to my laptop (I take my work laptop home). I was basically going to be late those nights, because you couldn't stop it and you were told if you dared shut your system down during this you were asking for trouble.

Obnoxious.

The thing that Windows has going for it is price. I wanted my wife to get a Mac, I was more than willing to have us spend the money, but she wanted to go as cheaply as possible. You can get those 11" HP Stream laptops for $199. 13" costs you $229. My wife didnt' want to live in the cloud (they only come with a 32GB solid state drive), so we dropped $250 for a 15" laptop with a conventional hard disk. Cheapest Mac is $1300.

So that's a good chunk of change, so I can understand - although personally if I was going in the $200 range I'd get a Chromebook.

[Arthur Dent]

Yeah, I like Mac too and especially the Linux under the hood aspect as maintained by a company that is testing to make sure things work properly together on their controlled hardware platform. Every time I've been in the market for a computer, I've been interested in getting a Mac but can just never justify the huge price premium especially given that Windows is what I'm used to and there the worry I'd have to spend a bunch of time finding new to solutions the problems I've already solved in Windows. Someday.

[IMADreamer]

Windows 7 and 8 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 free. I don't know anything about Windows 10 but if it means I can dump windows 8 I'm in on day one.

[Swirls]

Windows 7 and 8 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 free. I don't know anything about Windows 10 but if it means I can dump windows 8 I'm in on day one.

What I saw said it was only Windows 8 users, and it was a free upgrade for only one year. If I'm going to now have to pay a yearly subscription to use my [expletive] computer, I will go ape [expletive].

[jim]

Subscriptions are the trend. Everything in the cloud, nothing on your computer, pay as you go.

AD I have to admit I've never actually paid a dime for a Mac. I say I would, and I'm pretty sure I would if I had to, but my company pays for it. I take it home every night/weekends because often I will check on things at night.

The only time I had a Windows machine at work I was forced, we just got sucked into the SharePoint sales pitch and they were going to turn all of us software developers into SharePoint/.Net developers regardless of our backgrounds. That idea didn't work out very well, and I was able to dump the Windows machine after about a year which was more than enough.

[Jocephus]

the cloud idea has never impressed me.

[Donnie Ebert]

I don't really hate or love any OS out there; I just think of them as a tool to run the programs you need. I actually like Windows 8.1. It works quite nicely for my HTPC. The Netflix app is very nice, and the MLB.tv app feels more like watching a game than going through the browser (except that I hate when it makes you sign in almost every time it's opened. I do like font rendering on Macs and Linux more than on a PC, but otherwise, I like to tinker with all of them from time to time. I used to use Ubuntu on my home computers, but now I only have it on an old laptop, mostly because Windows Media Center is how I watch and record TV (from an antenna), and it works better than any of the other open source options I've tried. Macs (and all the included software) are great and I love the build quality of the MacBooks, but I'm getting a little frustrated by the fact that my 2009 MacBook Pro is extremely slow running Mavericks. It just seems like they are constantly bogging down the OS (in iOS as well) to get you to buy new hardware. I realize it is 6 years old, but Windows 7 and 8 run fine on some of my older PC's.

I will say I like Windows 7 (or 8) more for window management when I'm working on a bunch of programs like spreadsheets or documents. The Windows dock and it's little preview windows just seem more efficient than the Mac Dock.

From what I read about Windows 10, you can upgrade from 7 and 8 (or 8.1), and the "Free for the First Year" just mean that it is free if you update in the first year, like when Windows 8 was a reduced price for the first couple of months. After that they will charge you to upgrade (or more than likely Windows 11 will be announced, as it seems yearly updates will become the norm).

...current users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free for one year after the operating system launches. Once you’ve claimed the upgrade, Microsoft will keep you updated for the supported lifetime of the device.

I will agree that updating a reinstalled OS on Windows is obnoxious. I reinstalled Windows 7 on an old computer for my kids to use, and I swear it took a week of checking it every so often to get all of the updates installed, even with installing the Service Pack. I realize some updates are hardware specific, but it seems like many of the updates could be pooled to allow you to install most of them in one or two reboots.

[Jocephus]

never trust a terry

[haltz]

Windows 8 is annoying on my home computer, but it's pretty sweet on a tablet/notebook I just bought. It's made for touchscreens. With my desktop I basically never leave desktop mode and use the search key to do pretty much everything. With Windows 7 I installed an XP start menu.

Anyway, I bought an Asus Transformer for $249 at Microcenter and it's insane bang for your buck as an internet/media machine. The internal hard drive is [expletive] - but there's a USB port and I picked up another 32GB in the form of a flash drive at the checkout for $13.99. So basically who cares. Maybe I'll grow to hate it, but this feels like what Windows 8 was made for.

[SHOW]