ARRRGGGHH!!

I am just starting to realize how many hundred of modifications I made to the old computer over the years to get it just the way I wanted it. I now find myself doing the same thing with the new box.

It's not as easy as it used to be. The new OS (Windows 7) is a quantum leap from the time when computers were designed to be used as mundane tools. Now, they seem to be designed for people who have no idea what a computer is other than a vehicle for delivering email, browsing the web, and streaming movies. Makes it really difficult to dig into the guts to make the damn thing work properly (properly=my way). But I am making progress.

The computer nags me every day to update to Windows 10 Pro (the computer came with with a license for it). I know that drivers are not available for my printer under Window 10; not sure about the scanner. I am not going to buy new peripherals which I consider inferior to what I have. Guess I'll just leave the old box set up and use it when I must.

My laptop keeps nagging about Windows 10 too. I have no idea why I should or shouldn't move, and I'm happy enough where I am (Windows 8 ), so I keep ignoring it. Maybe I'll upgrade when they get closer to charging for it. (I'm told the upgrade is free for now, until the middle of the year sometime).

From what I hear, Richard, Windows 10 is a huge improvement over Win 8. Even 8.1 is a big improvement.
I have Windows 7 Pro, which is as close as I can come to XP (not close enough, however). At some point, I will probably have to "upgrade" to 10, but I won't do it until I have to.

Well if you want to get picky, I'm on v8.1 for x64 systems. I haven't seen any articles saying I should rush to v10, but I suppose I will eventually.

MUST. HOLD. TONGUE.

richard09 wrote:

Well if you want to get picky, I'm on v8.1 for x64 systems. I haven't seen any articles saying I should rush to v10, but I suppose I will eventually.

8.1 is a big improvement over 8.0.

NoCoPilot wrote:

MUST.  HOLD.  TONGUE.

Yes, you must. We all know what you would say, and it would be complete bullshit.

If you say so.

Sorry for that. Sometimes, my fingers get away from me.

I think I saw that... in Fargo.

Synchronicity.

Cabling horrors unplugged

OMG I could tell you stories about the hospital.

Cable management was done by three generations of techs (and a lot of contractors) who didn't give a shit what it looked like. Add budget and space constraints. Differing philosophies. Changing technologies. Perpetual shortage of proper length cables.

You could not possibly imagine how bad some of it was. The pictures in the article you linked look like our "after" photos after considerable cleanup.

I hope you will accept this as evidence that, at one time, I was capable of running cables properly. I would have liked to have found pictures of the overhead cable racks showing how precisely everything was done, but this is all I was able to find on the web. It's surprising that I found any pictures at all.

This photo shows one typical rack where cables terminate. No plugs; every terminus is wire wrap. There appears to be about a dozen multi-wire cables on this rack alone. Somewhere in this building, I ran cables as well as doing the type of termination work shown here.

One more thing the new box can do: it can run Google Earth. They made a change in the program at some point that caused problems with the video card in the old box. It runs fine (and faster) on the new machine.

BTW: You can now get Google Earth Pro free. It used to be $399 per year.

Installed the SSD as the system drive. I haven't yet made any changes to optimize for an SSD, but it is blazing fast right out of the box. Cold boot something under thirty seconds.

Here's a comparison of the SSD with a new, almost empty 1TB Seagate hard drive (SSD numbers on top).

Nice.

Really nice. Firefox uses about 350 MB of memory when you start it up. On the old box, it took maybe 20 seconds to load. Now it pops up instantly.

Now if I just had a decent internet connection....

Doing my part for the environment.

Watching the load on the UPS, I see the new box runs at seven percent load. The old box runs at thirteen to fourteen percent load. Both readings are with the systems essentially at idle. Quite a difference, considering the new system has a higher-resolution, slightly larger monitor, over five times as much RAM, and a four-core processor versus a single core on the old system. Of course, if I loaded up the new box with some resource-heavy programs running, it would make a big difference.

Been beating my head against the wall trying to find a better keyboard for the new box. The crappy little keys drive me nuts. I constantly hit two keys at a time. Tiny keyboards seem to be the big thing for some reason. I loved the keyboard on the old computer, but it has a PS-2 connector, which are absent on new computers. I tried an adapter, but it didn't work. After much poking around, I found that the keyboard drivers for the old computer are present on the new one, so I installed an old version of a program called IntelliPoint (mostly used for mouses) which loaded the proper drivers, plugged the old keyboard in with the adapter, and it worked!

While I had earlier been looking on-line for a solution to my problem, I noticed that the old keyboards are for sale, both used and new. So I ordered a new keyboard - the same as my twelve-year-old keyboard - for thirteen dollars. I had been looking at $150-$200 keyboards and hadn't liked any of them. Old farts and old keyboards go together like bacon and ....well, like bacon and more bacon.

Can never go wrong with more bacon.

I finally cracked and let the thing install Windows 10. First impressions are - blah. A few things seem to be actually harder to find, which is a retrograde step. And I don't do that much with the machine, so basically I don't see any real improvement anywhere. On the other hand, nothing broke, so that's a good thing.

Meh.

richard09 wrote:

On the other hand, nothing broke, so that's a good thing.

In the world of Windows, that's a major victory!

NoCoPilot wrote:

richard09 wrote:

On the other hand, nothing broke, so that's a good thing.

In the world of Windows, that's a major victory!

No doubt about that. Microsoft has a great ability to fuck up things that are working perfectly well.

Richard, if you watch DVDs on your computer, you will find that the Windows program that plays them is no longer present and you will have to get third-party software to play DVDs. I don't what else, if anything, they have removed.

richard09 wrote:

A few things seem to be actually harder to find, which is a retrograde step.

Well, that sucks. I find that on Windows 7 a lot of the system tools I am accustomed to using are harder to find. For example, why would they remove disk defrag from disk management? It's still there, but hard to find (lord praise the google). On the other hand, some of the system programs are much easier to use.

I had decide not to ever update to 10 because there is no driver from Canon for my printer, and until recently there was no driver for my scanner. Now Epson has released a Win 10 driver for the scanner, and I find by browsing through some forums, that the 8.1 driver from Canon works with 10, and there is a Win 10 driver available for the ip6600 printer (mine is ip6700) that works.

So maybe I will upgrade - but I'm in no hurry.

_Howard wrote:

So maybe I will upgrade - but I'm in no hurry.

You misspelled "downgrade."

I was speaking numerically.