Ever since her stroke, my mother has refused to turn on her PC. I think that she somehow connects the two, as she was sitting at the PC when it occurred. We've been growing fairly disgruntled with our desktop PC, as its got problems -- it'll run, but slowly. You see where I'm going with this.
My wife said that we could offer to buy the PC from her, and I told her that my mother would say Oh, No, Just Take It -- which is exactly what happened. Then, about fifteen minutes later, she said that she'd prefer to keep the keyboard, so that she could practice typing (!), which made us think that perhaps she'd like to have one after all So, we said, we'll swap our PC for yours.
Right now, her PC tower is sitting next to ours. It'll boot, though then that stupid Found New Hardware wizard pops up. My goal is to a) get hers configured like ours, b) wipe ours, and c) reinstall on ours the software that she'd had. I'm not sure how thats going to go. I had forgotten what a delight it is to move cables in a PC thats tucked away; not to mention, I'd forgotten how much fun it is to customize a PC -- turning off alerts, installing or deinstalling products, all of that. I don't really want to reinstall Windows, though I may have to; similarly, I don't really want to install Word Perfect on the old one -- we tried doing that once and somehow WP knew it wasn't on its original machine.
But we have a strong motivation to do it --our desktop has a 20 gig hard drive, hers has 150 gig -- and its a little faster; plus, its got two more USB ports. Most important, it doesn't have the 'installing' boot problem that ours does (which I think comes from when we tried to get a free firewall uninstalled, and it basically said No Way Jose; now, every time you start the PC, it tries to install something, don't know what -- even in safe mode). I'd like that problem to be gone, I just hate going nuclear on it.
But what really kills me is the power switch. Why can't you just plug a tower into a power bar and let that control whether the PC starts or not? My mother has a power bar thats up on the desk, but to turn on PC, she has to bend down and hit (first: find) the silly little button. That might have made sense fifteen years ago, but now there ought to be an 'always on' option. Gah...
Wonder how Macs handle it?
2 comments:
Oo - I don't envy you that task!
You might have to re-install Windows - sometimes it's literally the only way of solving a performance problem. On my "big" machine (dual CPU, what used to be tons of RAM, etc) I had an internal that held a copy of Windows, and the various bits of software - and I got the reinstall time down to about 3 hours, from a couple of days. This was before snapshot-technology was generally available (or reliable), so it was some time ago. 3, maybe 4 years ago? Oh - it was Windows XP Pro.
It got to the point where I was reinstalling everything (I almost had a batch file to most of the drudge work!) almost monthly.
These days, I use a couple of Mac's. Actually, we're an all-Mac house. The wife's get's rebooted, oh every time the power goes out for more than 4 hours. Although that should change as I connected it a huge UPS - one that drove my old big machine for a couple of hours. The Mac in the kitchen is rebooted every time the power goes out, and sometimes that screws it up a bit - another reboot usually solves the problem. And my "main" laptop, I, well, reboot it because I'm superstitious that way. Other than that, none of the machines get much in the way of reboots. (The wife's old Mac Cube was rebooted once or twice... No 3 times, once when we moved her office furniture around! She had that machine for a long time! It's going to be our "Living Room Computer" when I find its cables.)
Installing software on a Mac has definitely gotten better - just about all software comes with a customized "Finder" window, with instructions to drag the big app icon over the "Applications" folder icon (also big); the OS often asks if it can do that (type in your password) - and that's that. To delete it, you simply put the app into the trash; most of the apps will clean up after themselves; the ones that don't, well - it's not a big deal. There's no registry to get cluttered, and any bits that get left aren't that hard to find if you're anal about going after them - they just reside as files and folders on the disk, not doing much of anything.
Swap file management is easy - you ignore it. (My experience with early versions of Solaris gave me the superstition that I need to reboot unix-based machines every now and then! It forces the machine to clean up the swap file, which made it faster. File systems were a bit more primitive then, than now. Although, looking at the Mac's file and disk code - it's still a good idea to reboot, every now and then!) On my "big" machine, I dedicated an old disk to the swap file (the thing has something like 7 disks inside it!).
Hardware installation seems to be easy. If the MacOS knows that do with it - it'll do its thing. If not, it ignores it. I've never seen an Hardware Wizard on the Mac. (Oh - that does bring forth a memory: you probably will have to reinstall Windows. I had a similar problem, and took days tracking the error down. In the end, I simply reinstalled, and that did the trick.)
Windows is a good OS, but it's really not quite as advanced and user-friendly as Mac OS X. I think the difference lies in how the systems were designed: the horse by a committee, or the purity of just a single maniac (Steve Jobs does has a reputation...) Neither is better, and (despite the claims others make), both are better than Linux! (Which is about as unfriendly an OS as I've ever come across! It's still in the 1980's when it comes to advanced user-friendliness.)
Hope this helps, somehow. :-)
Carolyn Ann
I did find one interesting and useless bit of info -- whatever's causing that installer to kick off, it has to do with services -- if I disable all services, it doesn't happen, and if I enable any services, the amount of time that it's there is proportional to the number of enabled services.
Fun, huh? To add to the joy, Windows abruptly informed me that it had never been activated, so I got to spend fifteen minutes doing that, all the time wondering if they were about to demand something onerous, like the code from the back of the install CD thats around here someplace...
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