Tag: Windows

Apple, Authors Life, Computers, M1, Mac OS, MacBook Air, Microsoft, Technology, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Back to Mac

Elgon Williams, Author

Has it really been 15 years? I guess so. That was the last time I was in a similar situation – frustrated to the extreme with Microsoft Windows. Granted, there have been interim occasions of dissatisfaction with the powers that be in Redmond, WA, but none rose to the level of my issues with Windows Vista.

In 2006, I bought into the hype for the next edition of latest and greatest OS in the world. I’d been a long term Windows user since 3.1 and as a computer tech, I knew most of the tips and tricks to fix things whenever anything went amiss. Windows XP was by far my favorite version, though Windows 2000 was a close second. It was by far the most stable and Microsoft OS that still offered the ease of connection to USB devices on the fly, a great advancement over Windows NT 4. But 2000 was intended for business. So the mainstream was stuck between Windows 98 and all its issues and Windows ME, with its even worse issues. All Windows XP had to be was better than its consumer OS predecessors, which admittedly was a fairly low bar. Still, anyone who was alive back then and used a computer regularly probably had an overall positive experience with XP.

As Window’s successor, Vista offered lots of eye-candy, gee-whiz features. On the surface it was attractive, but its system requirements for having all those things turned on was staggering. And even then, state of the art machines running it seemed sluggish at times. For how damned pretty it could be, most people didn’t use versions with all the bells and whistles simply because they didn’t need such configurations. Also, there was an extensive and confusing assortment of flavors to choose from. The problem with Vista was that it seemed more like an OS designed by a marketing team than a functional operating system intended for productivity during the day and entertainment during the evening. Essentially most people didn’t get the point of Vista and so, they didn’t buy into it. Unless they just bought a machine with it preinstalled, they didn’t use it. For the majority of Windows users who were on XP, nothing was wrong with what they were using. If they were up-to-date with the security packages, Vista just wasn’t a compelling alternative.

But then, there was me. I worked in a computer store at the time. And that usually meant that Microsoft would issue complimentary discs of the new operating system to employees so that they could experience the differences first and and recommend the OS to customers. For whatever reason, MS decided not to do that with Vista. Maybe they didn’t want all us techies knowing first hand what a bloated piece of crap Vista was. I can’t say. But I managed to get a copy of Vista, the ultimate version with all the bells and whistles because I had a machine at home with the specifications to run it. Once it was installed, it was gorgeous. But it also made my system struggle. It was noticeably slower. After a week or so, I had turned off most of the eye candy in lieu of performance. For the most part, I was running Windows XP with a Vista skin on top. It seemed pointless, really. After a month, I’d ditched Vista and reinstalled XP. And a few months after that, I configured a dual boot with a distribution of Linux and discovered that I actually preferred the latter because it didn’t freeze or crash at all. There were entire weeks that I didn’t even once use Windows. Despite the pain in the ass of configuring Linux to suit me (something that has admittedly improved by leaps and bounds since 2007) it was a pleasure to just come home from work and be able to boot up a computer and not need to worry about updates and new virus definitions and all the other intrinsic parts of living with Windows.

So, you might be asking how I ended up using a Mac.

I could blame it on my youngest daughter. Despite having a techie father, she never got the hang of Windows – or rather the Microsoft way of viewing productivity. That’s really why the learning curve for a newbie picking up a Windows computer is steeper than Mac OS. Windows is, in many ways, counterintuitive. A lot of that has to do with the layers of complexity under the hood that allow it to be backward compatible. You see, Microsoft must support a wider range of users and environments than Apple. MS does not have complete control over the hardware their operating system will support. And, even though it is not really necessary to become an expert user in order to function within the Windows environment, it is by far easier for a curious computer user to adversely impact the stability of the operating system than it is with Mac OS, simply because the latter is pretty much locked down. The Mac side of the computing universe is intended for a different type of user, one who simply wants to be able to depend on their machine working as soon as it’s turned on. Knowing this, I ended up buying an iMac for my daughter.

Now, since the store where I worked sold Apple computers, I was familiar with the Mac OS enough to show the basics to anyone who bought a system, even though I’d never owned one myself. But after giving my daughter the standard tutorial, what surprised me was how quickly she was up and running with her new computer. In less than two hours, she was doing things on her Mac that she had never mastered on her Windows PC. And after a day or so, she was at a level of comfort approaching expertise. It got me thinking that the Mac OS’s simplicity might be a solution to my greatest frustration with Windows. Plus, it was much easier to find and install applications for a Mac than it was at the time for Linux. So, about a month after my daughter began using her iMac, Dad bought an iBook, which was more than I needed for my experimental venture into the other side of the computing universe. And I began using it as my daily driver.

For the next six years, I was a Mac guy…until a MacBook Pro – one I ended up with after my son changed computers – stopped working in 2013. The sticker shock of replacing it nudged me back toward the darkness of Windows. I bought a Microsoft Surface tablet and a keyboard as my next personal computer solution. Although I hated Windows 8 that came installed on it, it did make some sense whenever I was in tablet mode, which I rarely used. As soon as Windows 10 was released, I immediately upgraded it. And though I have always had mixed feelings about Windows 10, I grew to understand and mostly tolerate its quirks. However, within a few years, I was back to using Linux again for everything except the handful of work-related things that required Windows.

This summer, with the next iteration of Windows looming in the near future, I downloaded and played with a developer version for about a month. I was not as impressed as I would need to be in order to want to upgrade. In fact, there are some ‘improvements’ I absolutely abhor. Plus the requirements of TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot for the final release version feel particularly onerous to someone like me who would be dual-booting between Linux and Windows just because I prefer using Linux. Staying with Windows 10 is an option, of course, but support for it will eventually expire in 2025. And so, I began rethinking my essential needs for a computer. The more I did, the more attractive the relatively new M1 MacBook Air seemed. Not only is it light and portable, which is something I’ve always desired in a laptop but have not had since my MS Surface Pro died, but also the M1 can run for hours on a charge allowing me to unplug in a realistic and usable way. Also, I can travel with my daily computer without it weighing me down or worrying about where the nearest charger is when I’m in an airport waiting to connect with a flight. At 13 inches for the screen, it is compact enough to fit between my belly and the next seat back when riding a coach.

Mainly, I wanted the MacBook Air for doing my writing. I wanted to be able to get away from my desk, maybe go downstairs to work on edits – or – sit in bed and compose a chapter or two. Whenever the world returns to some semblance of normalcy, perhaps I can take a walk to a coffee shop to do some creative writing. So far, I’m loving the new machine. The keyboard is excellent, the best experience I’ve had with a laptop. The touchpad, though I usually opt to use a mouse, is by far more functional than any I’ve used. Thus far, I haven’t needed to default to a mouse, so who knows? I might actually turn into a trackpadder.

I’ll still be using a dual boot machine with Windows and Linux on it to do a lot of my work. But already I have shifted some tasks to the MacBook and generally think I could do everything from it if need be. Beyond being a composition and editing tool for my writing projects, it has the power I need to edit and produce the videos Christine Gabriel and I do for the Pandaverse Book Club’s The C & E Show. I plan to test that in the near future, so check back for updates on my Mac adventure as my saga continues and evolves. For now, just knowing it is possible (even when I’m traveling) is a huge advantage.

Computers, Software, Technology, Windows 10

Windows 10: Rethinking The Operating System

Elgon Williams, Author

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Windows 10 is about a week away from being available to the world. In truth it has been available to everyone for a very long time, just they needed to sign off on having a potentially buggy beta version of software running on one of their machines. Yes, I realize most people do not have multiple personal computers. So does Microsoft. That’s why they disclaim the heck out of everything necessary for a user to get into the Windows Insider’s Program. Once opted in users may play with a new, experimental version of an operating system that may or may not end up looking like what you get. AT least that was the case up to about a month ago, when Microsoft stopped adding on new features and shifted the focus on removing bugs and optimizing performance.

For a lot of techie people, like me, playing with new stuff is fun. Even the bugs and finding a work-around for them become an adventure. It’s kind of like taking a dare as a kid. You know? But for most people, playing with really buggy software that you use everyday on a machine would be frustrating and is ill advised. Having said all that, Insiders have the option of continuing to receive regular updates and experimental versions of Windows 10 even after it is officially released. You see, the version that was released a little over a week ago to the Insider community, Build 10240, is called TH 1 Threshold 1. Microsoft is already working on TH2, the next version of Windows 10 which may make it as a released update later this year.

The overall idea behind the perpetual beta testing is sound for a company like Microsoft that has always been in the business of making applications that work for the mainstream on a variety of platforms. Granted, they are probably best at writing code that works on their own operating systems but they develop stuff for other OSes as well. Most people are unaware, for example, that MS is one of the largest software developers for Mac OS.

The Redmond, Washington tech giant has always been focused on applications. That is where most of their money is made, licensing software to businesses and consumers of such programs as MS Office.

How did MS get into the operating system business? One day in the distant past IBM approached them with the idea of creating a disc OS that would work on a personal computer that would compete head-to-head with what Apple was making. The result was PC-DOS and, a little while thereafter later, MS-DOS that worked on brands of personal computers other than IBM.

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IBM and MS continued in a development partnership for a while in an attempt to create a more user-friendly Interface. Most people think this came in response to the first iteration of Mac OS, but in fact OS2 was in the works even as Apple was developing “Lisa”, which was the precursor to Mac OS. When MS and IBM had a falling out over the direction of the new operating system, OS2 emerged from IBM’s portion of the code and Windows was released from what MS took. The two systems were mutually compatible with DOS and, up to Windows 3.1 and OS2 Warp 3.0, could actually run programs cross platform. Sometimes new drivers needed to be loaded in order to get full support from things like sound cards and graphics accelerators, but you could actually run Windows in OS2. After all, up to that time Windows was really an application that rode on the backbone of DOS.

Apple introduced the personal computer world to using a mouse and a graphical user interface years ahead of the IBM-MS world. Although there were functions created for a mouse that worked in DOS-based applications, quite honestly, they felt primitive when compared to what was happening from the folks in Cupertino, California. Apple was driving innovation – sometimes, even often, in strange and unexpected directions that ended in failure. But that is the essence of living on the frontier. You fail more often than you succeed and, if you are smart, you end up figuring out how to market your failures, repackaging the idea under a fresh disguise. Apple has been good at doing that. I would dare to say that the ill-fated Newton of the 90’s was the conceptual precursor to the iPhone, iPad and iOS. Certainly, it was the first hand-held personal computing device, years ahead of those somewhat less clunky things Compaq, HP, Sony and others foisted in the early part of this century as handheld devices.

The evolutionary step, the innovation all others lacked in gaining mass appeal, came when Apple integrated a cellphone into the device. Remember the lambasting Apple received in the tech press for the first iPhone? “This is not the best cellphone out there” one reviewer said after completely missing the point of the device.  The access to the cellphone network made the iPhone a truly portable, handheld computer able to access the Internet from virtually anywhere and fit into your pocket. Oh, by the way, because it could access the Internet through the cellphone network, here’s a phone application and a text messaging application just in case you want to use those.  What’s more the keyboard for text messaging was integrated into the operating system! in 2007 those were major tech coups for Apple.

It’s easy to forget  – or perhaps we would like to forget – where we have been and what we have been through with recent operating system development.  Following the rollicking success of MS Windows XP, which was the first OS to integrate the nifty feature set and hardware support of Windows 95/98 into an operating system for the mainstream that shared the business OS, Windows NT, core, Microsoft decided to explore the possibilities of a really pretty and sometimes functional graphical user interface with the ill-fated Windows Vista. I can tell you, from personal experience, Windows Vista was so bad that it drove me to playing with various flavors of Linux as my home computer interface and eventually prompted me to cross-over to the dark side – using Mac OS X.

As a computer tech I had experience with Apple products over the years and had, on occasion, needed to use that knowledge to fix this or that for an Apple aficionado. It was just that I had never previously made the leap on my own home system until 2007. I switched to a Mac and, although there is a saying that once you go Mac you never go back, I have bucked the system by returned to using Windows earlier this year.

Here’s why I jumped off the Apple platform. Despite loving Mac OS and the Apple universe of things, I’ve been seeing some chinks in Apple’s shining armor. Maybe it’s just me but after Steve Job’s tragic death I think the vision in Cupertino is a lot more like it was in the mid 1990’s – when Apple ousted Jobs for a while and began a period of struggle that nearly ended the company. Yeah, I could be wrong. Apple is a giant in the industry right now and the most valuable company in the world. It is still doing a lot of things right. But I think its relative gain in PC market share over the past few years has been due to MS’s failings. Also the entire pie is shrinking as more and more people discover that their tablet and/or phone does most everything they used to do on their PC. More and more people don’t need at PC at home. With Windows 10 that trend may be ready to reverse to some extent.

Not only does Windows 10 do whatever you can do on Mac OS, but it also ups the ante a bit here and there along the way. In other words, the folks in Redmond, Washington are back to innovating things that people like as well as things people want to do with their computers, such as using them as virtual assistants and automating everything in a home or business with one shared interface. Overall, for consumers, the immediate future could be a lot of fun as Apple and Microsoft strive to outdo one another again – like in the old days.

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About a week ago, Microsoft released Build 10240 to Windows Insiders – aka beta testers. This was, in essence, the Release to Manufacturer (RTM) version of the OS. But, unlike what happened with every previous version of Windows, it did not receive the usual fanfare. Golden discs were not flown via helicopter to the major manufacturers that use Windows as the operating system for their lines of personal computers. Let’s face it, folks, the PC world has changed. It is not a growing industry anymore. It is actually in significant decline, near double digit decline on an annualized basis.

Despite how ubiquitous Windows has always been in the business world it’s market share in the home has been steadily eroded over the past few years. From personal experience I can attest that Mac OS is easier to learn. Also, it doesn’t require you to know how to build a clock in order to tell time – if you know what I mean. Windows has always had some maintenance issues like installing updates and running utilities in the background to correct things that don’t work right all the time. It has always been a huge target for viruses and malware not because it is inherently easier to attack than Mac OS but because there are more devices in the world running Windows. As Mac OS has become more prevalent viruses have begun to appear in that side of the universe as well.

Although there are updates and such in the Mac world the end-user does not have to do as much or as often as with a Windows-based machine. For the most part, the updates install in the background and many users aren’t even aware that it is happening until there is a prompt to accept the changes to the OS and/or reboot the system.

In defense of Microsoft, they have always had quite a load on their table -to write code that works over a broader spectrum of devices than does Apple. One of Apple’s strengths is that they control the hardware side of things and they do, at times, decide that certain machines are just too old to support with a new and improved OS. That happens about every seven to ten years.

Perhaps the innovation lag of late for MS products verses Apple was due to the amount of time and resources needed for MS to be all things to all users. But, in the past year or so there has been a subtle change in the PC industry. Microsoft is staging a come back in a huge way but has done so rather quietly compared to the fanfare, swagger and bluster of previous OS launches. I doubt anyone would have paid attention to such a campaign anyway. For the majority of people the launch of Windows 10 is receiving a group yawn. The people I know who are anxiously awaiting it are techies or people who hate the OS that came with their PC and want something that runs better and is more usable. The vast majority of the later group have machines that came with Windows 8.

Microsoft has taken some advantage of Apple’s stumbles, slips and falls over the course of history and these times may prove to have similar conditions. I’m not a harbinger or anything like that, but I switched to back to Windows in April for a reason. It was mostly a functional change because I liked the features of a Surface Pro 3 verses the best of the best (with a newer processor) that Apple was offering at about $200 more. Also I ended up replacing a iPhone 4 with a Windows Phone a while back. So a lot of the trouble others has getting used to Windows 8 was not something I experienced.

There is a lot a value to the integration of the Windows operating system across platforms, especially for gamers using Xbox but also for business users. Even if you need to keep your present iPhone or Android device, Windows 10 has a phone connection application that works, allowing you to easily transfer your files between devices. That may prove to be one of it’s most immediately ‘cool’ features that people enjoy.

Microsoft embraces the idea that an operating system should be usable for anyone, but they have also focused on creating an piece of software that is essentially the same across every computing device you use. Part of their failure with Windows 8 was trying to force a transition to a UI that was friendly to the mobile devices but also worked on non-touchscreen devices as well. That met with much resistance. Windows 8 and the somewhat corrected Windows 8.1 had many shortcomings for people who use mice and external keyboards. On a tablet like the Surface, Windows 8.1 may actually be the pinnacle achievement in functionality.

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Now we are at the cusp of change once more. Windows 10 is about to release and it promises to be an upgrade packed with a lot of fixes and some new features that merge the best of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Having never really used Windows 7 (I was living on the darkside by then) I can only say that Windows 10 returns the start button for those who may have missed it. By the way, do you recall the heat MS took in 1995 when they innovated the start button? How times have changed!

The start menu looks like Windows 8.1, Live tiles work to keep you up-to-date on the status of your news, weather, market and sports apps. And you can switch if you are using a tablet or use the OS in desktop mode.

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I’m using Windows 10 now to access the blogs interface on the Internet, and have a external monitor plugged into my Surface Pro 3’s docking station. Obviously it works. I’m also using Windows Edge, the new, faster browser.

Most of what is different in Windows 10 is how it bridges the gaps in function between Windows 7 and the attempted leap forward with the Windows 8, “Metro” GUI. There were a lot of things I liked about Windows 8 – like the “charms bar”. Many people hated that and I get the reasons why, but it was pretty easy to access with a touch interface the features usually found on top of any open window. I guess the average end-user couldn’t grasp that concept or perhaps it was just ahead of its time. I kind of hope MS brings the charms bar back as an option, but the settings for each application are now displayed across the top of the open Window. There is peace and harmony restored to the PC universe.

As for the rest of Windows 10, I like it. I recommend it. There are still some lingering things that need to be addressed, such as allowing the use of a PIN to log in while in Tablet mode and support for some email servers I use. If you are going to upgrade to Windows 10 you need to rethink things about your expectations of an operating system. As of July 29th, Windows is a service. That means, MS will be responsive – more so – to the feedback they receive from end users. Complain about something enough and, provided others are having a similar problem or need, things will change – hopefully for the better.

As a service, Windows is not really finished and it never will be. It has never been intended to be finished. It is not revolutionary but, instead, evolutionary. Like previous versions of Windows there is continuity with the past but, at the moment, the impending release of Windows is merely a snapshot due to go public next week. In time it will be upgraded whether it is “fast ring “or “slow ring” – terms beta testers understand and, as soon to be end users of Windows 10, you are about to learn all about. This OS will be an evolving entity for at least the next ten years that MS supports it. And it works on machines that support Windows 7 SP1 – so it runs on some pretty old hardware. That in itself is remarkable.

It is offered as free to upgrade from Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 – for the first full year after official release. So, if you decide to wait and see whether it is worth the time and effort to upgrade, you can. As a continually evolving system it will always be as new as the latest update you download and just as fresh. This will allow the OS to have security features and new integrated applications offered on-the-fly to address changing consumer needs and desires. Yes, in lieu of all that, you give up some of the nice, comforting feel you get from having just installed an operating system from a DVD that you can store on a shelf just in case things go haywire and you need to do a clean install. You can certainly purchase a disc or flash-drive version of Windows 10 but be warned, as soon as you complete an install you will be on the Internet downloading updates. The longer between the creation of the version on your disc and the present, the more updates.

A lot of people, some of them at Microsoft, have called Windows 10 the last version of Windows. With change coming every couple of seconds (if not faster) in the PC world there are always new demands and Windows as a service addresses the critical need for an operating system on your personal computing devices that is agile enough to rapidly adapt. The benefit is that your system will always be up-to-date and more secure than ever before. The downside is that you lose a modicum of control, feeling that you own something when, in fact, you never really did own previous versions of Windows but purchased a license to use software for whatever length of time MS supported it. In essence, nothing has changed except the wording in the End User’s Licensing agreement. From now on, once you upgrade to Windows 10, you will receive periodic updates for the duration of the product’s support period on your machine. You have only the option to select whether it will be done immediately upon receiving the update (fast ring) or sometime within a month of the update’s release (slow ring).

Windows will run on your machine and receive periodic updates for security and additional features you may or may not use. Microsoft is only going to support systems with the latest version of the operating system and despite the blowback they are receiving from some circles of end users, this is actually necessary for all concerned. People with unsecured operating systems threaten to infect everyone else’s computers. Not only that, but they create a lot of headaches for MS customer support.

Operating systems have come and gone but Windows 10 is here to stay for the next ten or so years. I’m excited about where the PC world could be heading. But time will tell, just as it always does, whether the latest and greatest operating system lives up to its potential. Microsoft has disappointed us in the past. My hope is that Windows 10 fulfills all expectations. So far, having used several early variants of it, I like it a lot.

Uncategorized

My Thoughts On Microsoft Windows 10

Elgon Williams, Author

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Over the past couple of months I’ve played with the Technical Preview of both Windows 10 Pro for PC and Windows 10 for phones. I used the operating systems daily for a while and put them through the acid test of practical use. Of course there were bugs and things that just didn’t work properly. The versions were beta software and therefore not fully developed. But I have to say I liked the direction operating systems are headed and found them amazingly stable for the most part.

Having said all that, I am reverting back to Windows 8.1, at least for the near term. Microsoft just announced the official release for Windows 10, due out on July 29. Those who are running Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 can reserve a copy for download and install the moment the new OS is released. To avoid the huge bandwidth traffic jam that might be expected, Microsoft will actually be downloading the new OS onto the machines of those who had reserved copies. The file is around 3GB in size and you will have the option of not installing it. However, the necessary upgrade files will be stored on your computer in advance of the release. If you opt to install the files your computer will be upgraded immediately. Having installed the betas of the software, I will say the process is about as smooth and effortless as anything I’ve ever experienced from any software manufacturer. It really is designed to allow you to sit back and relax during the process.

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I have used Windows 8.1 on my phone for quite a while but I really hadn’t worked with the OS on a PC until I purchased a Surface Pro 3 back in April. Although I had a few days of asking my son (who has more experience using the software) how to do this and that, the learning curve was brief. And, like most MS products, if you don’t know how to do something with the new OS there is a way to accomplish it the old way, once you figure out where it is hidden and how to access it. Backward compatibility is important for businesses and that is a large part of the reason for Windows being the ubiquitous OS that it is for professionals.

As someone who had used various flavors of Linux, every version of Windows from 3.1 to Vista and Apple Mac OS from 9.4 to OS X 10.10 Yosemite I think I can speak to user experience and intuitiveness. Linux in all is variations is not for the newbie. Hands down Mac OS has been always the most user friendly especially for a beginner (yes, there still are some of those left in the personal computer world). I’ve personally taught novices how to use the OS in less than ten minutes. My youngest daughter used Windows 98 and XP for years and never really mastered it beyond rudimentary functionality but she learned Mac OS X to a high functional level in about a half day. My oldest sister used Windows 98 and Windows XP for years as well and uses a Windows based machine at work. About a year or so ago she switched to Mac OS X and has been using her new computer more often doing things on it she never learned to do with Windows.

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Microsoft attempted to close the gap of usability with the much maligned Windows 8 Metro tiles. For a novice using a touch screen computer it is easier to learn. However, for someone who had used previous versions of Windows the experience of adapting was frustrating, especially if the user had never used a Windows Phone or was running Windows 8 on a machine not equipped with a touch screen. It was a little like playing Where’s Waldo when trying to figure out where the software developers had hid things like Control Panel and the desktop. Windows 8.1 addressed some of those issues, though not all.

Personally I like Windows 8.1. But then, I use a Windows Phone. My entire experience with Windows 8.1 for PC has been on a MS Surface Pro 3 which is designed specifically for that software. In fact, after upgrading to the technical preview for Windows 10 I missed some of the Tablet Mode features of 8.1 that have been removed. The Beta version of Window 10 has a good deal more flexibility and ease of use in switching back and forth between tablet and desktop modes and I found that I was using desktop mode a lot more often with Windows 10 than Windows 8.1, perhaps because it is simple to toggle. However, the version of Windows 10 I was using (Build 10074) had a nasty tendency to crash Tablet Mode when it first booted up, leaving a black screen. The work around was to CRTL+ALT+DEL to Sign Off and then Sign In and by then everything would work. My speculation is that the instability was related to a new feature that allows a transparency overlay for the background when in Tablet Mode.

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There were other big issues with Window 10 Preview. One was the incomplete implementation of Outlook for email that prevented me from accessing a POP3 account I use regularly. Another was the OS’s tendency to keep wanting me to renew my Windows Credential. I could not turn that feature off for whatever reason though it is used mainly in Enterprise Editions.  Annoyance level 4/10.

Another issue I had was a random Out Of Memory alert that would pop up that did not seem to be telling me anything at all about the functioning of my computer – i.e., there was nothing halted, crashed or running slow at the time and it even happened when I wasn’t doing anything at all on the computer.

The last thing I found vexing was that an internet based text entry box on Word Press that I use a few times each week runs extremely slow. And I’m talking about it being like entering text on Window 3.0 running on a i386 machine, as in I’d type ahead and the computer would catch up to me eventually. That was the deal breaker that decided me to revert back to 8.1. I’m sure this issue is related to memory management and it may have something to do with the reason for the random Out Of Memory alert. The same problem occurred, by the way, with MS Word if the document was more than 100 pages – like a manuscript.

#Microsoft #Windows #Windows10 #Windows Phone #MacOsX #Linux

Uncategorized

Geek Week Special: Twenty Years On A Computer – Part 2

Elgon Williams, Author

The computer I’d purchased a few months before became a puzzle to me. When that happened it became an irresistible source of fascination. I’m like that about solving problems. It’s my sort of OCD.

The next time I went to The Wiz to look other games for the kids that would work I decided to hang out and eavesdrop on the conversations between the sales persons and the customers, figuring I might learn something. Whether anyone knew what he or she was talking about was immaterial at that point. If they knew anything about computers they knew more than I did.

At work, when there was a chance, I picked the brains of everyone who owned a personal computer. They told me I needed to defragment my hard drive from time to time and that there was a program in DOS for doing that. Who knew that was important? Also I learned about how HIMEM.SYS, the magical file that loaded at the DOS level during the boot process, would allow Windows to load into upper memory. You see, it was a kind of shell game, actually. Everything had to fit into DOS memory for the computer to be happy, but Windows needed far more than the 640 kBs of room allocated. HIMEM.SYS performed a trick loading a 10 kB flag into DOS memory to redirect Windows into upper memory where it could find enough room but in the profess DOS believed all of it fit neatly into DOS memory. Nice trick.

Around that time was also the first occasion I heard the infamous quote attributed to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, that he could not conceive of anyone every needing more than 512 kb of memory. Some of that philosophy was related to the laws of the legacy architecture of the first IBM PC.

Yes, it sounds silly, doesn’t it? But that was exactly what was going on. Beneath which shell is the pea hiding? Later on, as Microsoft persisted in their attempts to make a better operating system, this little trick resulted in what became termed a memory leak that necessitated periodic rebooting of the operating system to clear out the flags resident in DOS memory.

There were problems with DOS memory beyond how Windows loaded, though. Because of HIMEM.SYS, loading a DOS game from Windows didn’t work. The program could not access the sound card, for example. So, with games like the Disney one my daughter wanted to use I needed to exit to DOS and load the game there. However, the reason he game was telling me I didn’t have enough memory was because I had to boot up the computer into DOS from the start.

My friends explained that playing with the order of execution of all those strange 8.3 files names that displayed on the screen while booting up in DOS could remedy the problem with my daughter DOS game.

As 1994 wore on, started buying copies of PC Magazine and other publications in more effort to learn everything there is to know about PCs. Also, my wife at the time invited her Korean friend and her American ex-GI husband over to dinner. He was reportedly a computer guru of some kind. If he knew anything at all about DOS he knew more than I did.

He helped me edit the order of execution in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and the result gave my daughters game enough memory to play properly. He resolved several other mysteries about how everything worked together as far as the computer was concerned. He invited me to attend a computer fair with him the first weekend of the upcoming month. It was held at a nearby hotel. He promised that I would learn more than I could ever want to know about computer if I went there, watched and learned.

Often since, I’ve wondered if that was the real beginning of my quest for more knowledge, that if I had not gone to the computer fair would I have continued to pursue learning everything I eventually would about computers? I might have found the answers to all my questions in a different way. But the fact was that going there excited me to learn more about building PC’s. That became one of my objectives, actually building my own system from component parts. Still, I knew I had a long way to go before being at that level of skill or understanding.

Also, it was while I was at the show I first learned or other operating systems besides Windows 3.1. There was Windows NT 3.51, OS/2 Warp 3.0 and I heard some talk about a rumored revolutionary new version of Windows that was to-be-released sometime in 1995.

Most of my free time I was converting pages of text into digital files. The scanner worked, sort of. The OCR program was not very accurate, so I ended up editing the ext. So I wants sure how much time it was actually saving me. Eventually I ended up manually transcribing the pages, typing them into a digital format because, in doing so, I could revise what I’d written years ago. I very long and involved process of converting thousands of pages of notes, stores and journals began that would take the next three years or weekends and some vacations.

As the document files grew I noticed how slow my computer really was. Repaginating changes to existing large document files took seconds to complete. So I ended up creating multiple documents, one for each chapter, in an effort to minimize the lag when the document needed to update with any changes I made. Still, it was considerably faster to editing things on the computer than it was to retype a page or cut and paste thing together using scissors and tape. I could already see the potential benefit of a computer for creating a book.

In the next installment, I go from knowing enough about computers to be dangerous to actually learning to build one from scratch, the essential step to becoming a computer technician.

#nostalgic #computers #PC’s #DOS #Windows #computertech

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Geek Week Special: Twenty Years On A Computer – Part 1

Elgon Williams, Author

As a computer geek I have officially proclaimed this a Geek Week and as such I’ll be posting a nostalgic story about my personal evolution with computers. Some may find the references to older hardware quaint. Others may empathize with my quest for knowledge as I recount going from computer novice to computer guru. But I think anyone who has ever used a personal computer will be able to relate to a lot of this.

Actually, it was twenty and a half years ago that I started to use a personal computer. It’s just that except for playing solitaire most of the time I sat at my desk staring at the Windows 3.1 screen filled with icons wondering why I ever paid $1600 for a machine that substituted for a deck of cards.

I worked in retail management, so I didn’t have a lot of free time anyway. The computer was something I resisted buying for as a long as possible because I’d heard they become obsolete really fast. It was January when my now ex-wife decided we needed to look for a computer, ostensibly for the kids because our son was seven going on eight and our oldest daughter was in kindergarten while my youngest was in preschool. I suppose it sort of made sense. We could foresee that the kids were going to grow up in a world of computers and we wanted them to have every possible advantage in life.

We went to the nearest Nobody Beats The Wiz store in Meriden, CT. It was just a few miles from where we lived in Wallingford. They were having a sale on some things, as always and were offering special financing on their store credit card. We had one of those too. I’d heard about PC’s and Macs, of course. The store carried both platforms. I didn’t have a side in that battle because I never thought I needed a computer. The store carried both so I figured we’d get the story and make a choice.

I liked the way the Macs looked as opposed the variety of PC’s but in my wife’s logic PC’s were better because there was more software titles available. As we perused aisle after aisle of boxes of PC software she continued to make her point. Then she stopped at the section for Mac and pointed out how few the options were, with a waving gesture and a vocalized, “See.”

I shook my head. “It looks to me like everything you need to do on a computer is pretty much covered right here, though.” I pointed out that the couple of software vendors representative supported the Apple platform very well. “I mean how many different word processors do you need for a computer?”

“We need PC. It does Windows.” She explained in her customary truncated way with a Korean accent.  She didn’t see my point.  Neither did she want to acknowledge that Microsoft, the maker of Windows for the PC, was one of the software developers for Macs. Her mind was made up and I knew form experience there wasn’t a point in debating the matter further. The number of software titles available was the only reason we ended up looking at PC’s as opposed to Macs.

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The salesperson was helpful enough in supporting her cause. Personally he owned a PC and claimed that everyone he knew who had a Mac complained about having compatibility issues with PCs. Then he went over the differences between IBM’s line of computers and the various ‘clones’. “We buy the real thing,” my wife said. So we opted for the IBM Consultant line of computers. There were essentially two models we were deciding between. One sported a zippy new Intel Pentium running at a blistering 60Mhz. The price for the latest system including a 14 inch monitor was $2400. The other was last years state of the art checking in at $1600. I was thinking along the lines of getting the best available because it would have at least a year less obsolescence, but the salesperson said there was a error in the Pentium’s math co-processor. Not that it was really going to cause any problems for anyone using it for a home computer but that soured my wife on the Pentium. Also she saw the Intel 486 25MHz model as a viable alternative, kind of ‘on sale’. It looked almost exactly like the Pentium model, ran all the same software and it could be upgraded with a chip to run at 50 MHz. In fact, the salesperson explained we could upgrade the modem from 300 baud to the lasted thing which was a 28,800 bps deluxe modem – except that he said the fasted online services available used either 9,600 or 14,400. The system came with 4MB of RAM and a 170MB hard drive. The RAM could be upgraded as could the hard drive, the salesperson explained, but the system used something called disc compression to more efficiently use its space so it was like having 240 MB of room.

All those numbers and options swirled around in my head. At the time I barely knew anything about computers. When I was in college we used mainframes to write batch programs on punch cards. Right before I graduated the upperclassmen in computer science were allowed to use the CRT terminals to process their programs. I had been pretty good at writing programs, though. So I sort of fancied the idea of maybe buying the software for writing programs for a PC and selling them on the side.

We got the system home, unpacked, hooked up and I turned it on. It booted up successfully to the Windows screen. Success! Now what?

“You figure out,” my wife said. “You show kids.”

Six months after the purchase, I was still trying to figure out a lot of things about the computer. For one, why did I needed AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve? Couldn’t I just use one or the other of them for connecting to this thing called The Internet so I could start sending and receiving emails? Oh, and by the way, who was I supposed to be sending emails to anyway? Except for a few guys at work, I didn’t know anyone who had a computer. Which one of the online services was better? That was the essence of my dilemma. The few times I had been online using Prodigy, I noticed how slow things seemed. I tired AOL but couldn’t figure out how to use it. And Compuserve had all these things called Forums that I didn’t understand.

I mentioned to one of my computer savvy friends at work how slow my computer seemed when it was connected online. He told me to upgrade to a 14,400 bps modem. He said 28,800 was wasting my money since no one used that yet. And the best thing about the faster modems was that they could be used for faxing things in a snap. I could create faxes on the computer and send them out. Oh, and I could buy a scanner and use that along with a printer and my PC would act just like a fax machine.

So, I paid $1600 for a deck of cards and a fax machine. What else could this thing do that was useful?

Somewhere along the line I noticed a word processor was included in a program called Microsoft Works. My friend at work told me Works was an office program for homeowners. He said businesses use programs like Lotus 1,2,3 or Office. The idea occurred to me that something I could do with my computer was take those boxes of typed pages that I had produced in my effort to write the great American novel and somehow convert them into files stored on the computer. That way I edit them without literally cutting and pasting paper. Yeah, that was how editing was done back in the day, you know? Finally, there was something sort of useful I can do with this $1600 machine.

The kids for whom the PC was originally purchased had watched me use it a couple of times. My son played solitaire on it. The girls weren’t very interested in sitting in one place long enough to learn much about it. None of them were yet using computers int he classroom. My boy expressed interest in playing some video games if I’d install them. The ones he wanted said they’d work on the computer.

I took a vacation week in the middle of the summer. It was a slower time of year for my departments, so they wouldn’t miss me much at the store. I decided to return to The Wiz and ask a bunch of questions and make my computer useful. First order of business was upgrading the hardware as much as possible. Second was buying some software to entice the kids to using it. Third was getting a printer and maybe a scanner because my wife was thinking about starting a business and she could use the computer for sending and receiving faxes.Also someone at work said there was a way of scanning a page of text and having the computer convert it into a digital file using optical character recognition. I wanted to do that to all those typewritten pages.

When I arrived at The Wiz I looked for my salesperson from months ago, but it was his day off. His boss was there, though. We talked about modems first. His take on it made some sense. Eventually everyone will be using 28,800 and it wasn’t that much more expensive Also adding in the extra memory would make the computer faster as well as dropping in the DX2 math coprocessor that make my machine purr at 50MHz. Oh and there was a 540MB hard drive available. I could have plenty of room for storing all the files I’d be creating with my scanner as well as the new ones I’d be writing. There would even be enough room for storing all my wife’s business stuff for whenever she decided what sort of business she wanted to start.

Oh yes, I bought some games. I needed to get the kids using the computer. After all, wasn’t that why we bought the thing int he first place?

After spending a lot of money that first day of my vacation I had a whole week to get all that stuff installed and working. The memory turned out to be a snap, literally. With the system restoration disks that came with my computer the manager at The Wiz assured me that installing the larger hard drive would be a breeze, especially since I had next to nothing stored on my original hard drive. He suggested I keep it in a drawer just in case the new hard drive ever crashed. I could boot up the system with that. Although it took a while to feed in all those floppy disks in the proper order the hard drive install proved to be simple as well. Getting the printer installed wasn’t that hard either. The scanner, however, took a phone call to IBM tech support. They walked me through doing it, for a fee, of course. It required adjusting some things in what they called BIOS and to do that I had to enter the dreaded Setup Menu that they warned me never to enter unless I was talking to someone in tech support.

After all that, I figured I was pretty savvy. I was ready to tackle the modem install. It said int he instruction that it should be pretty easy. Just set it up the same way as the existing modem. Well, it wasn’t that simple. It urned into a major pain in the butt.

Adamantly I refused to call IBM tech support again because paying for them to explain how to do something that should be user friendly seemed absurd. After all, once they explained about the serial and parallel ports on my machine and something about the COM Port in BIOS, I was able to get the scanner working along with the printer.

My stubbornness persisted for much of the rest of the week as each day I’d wake up and wrestle with different ideas of how to get the modem working. It seemed so simple in the instructions but what it said in the manual wasn’t working at all. I resorted to calling the modem manufacture’s tech support, seeing as it was their product I was installing and tech support for that should be free fir the first month, right? After trying a few things, changing some jumper settings not he card, they gave up, punting to IBM because, according to the the guy on the phone, everything should be working so there much be some conflict, maybe between IRQ’s – whatever those were.

Well, after a week of frustration with this faster modem thing and getting it to plug into properly to what I now considered a made-for-adults puzzle, I was ready to pay the money to learn the secret. IBM tech support confirmed it was an IRQ (Interrupt Request) setting that needed to be adjusted. Also, they explained that since we had changed settings to install the scanner and printer I needed to reassign the COM ports on the modem. It sounded complicated, but tech support told me how to get into the system setup menu in BIOS again make some changes and, once I did that, everything worked.

You’d think that I’d never want to crack open the case again, just leave good enough alone. But after learning how to tweak things a bit I was hooked. I had made my machine significantly faster while upgrading its storage capacity and made it more functional – even if a month after all the expensive upgrades no one but me was using anything I’d installed – except my oldest daughter had tried using the Disney software in DOS that, despite my having installed more memory continued to tell her she was out of memory. Every time she wanted to play the game I had to close out of Windows and reboot into DOS. Sometimes it would play fine but other times it would not.

After asking my friend at work about it he explained how DOS memory worked and that I needed to edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to free up memory. Just when I thought I’d figured out everything about my computer, now there was this new wrinkle. Pursuing the solution would take me on an adventure that continued for years. Ever in pursuit of a more powerful computer to do this or that better than my old one, at the end of the journey I became a self-taught computer technician…and that’s another story for next time.

#personalcomputers #computers #geeks #Windows #DOS #upgrades

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The Way To Write (In Case You Were About To Ask)

Elgon Williams, Author

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Something I have done most of my life, starting around age twelve or so, is write. First with was with pencil or pen and paper. Eventually, sometime toward the conclusion of high school when I was on the school newspaper staff – I graduated to composing on a typewriter – do you remember those things? I never took typing lessons in school. Those who edit my work can attest to that fact. But writers find a way of communicating through whatever means is available and at the time a typewriter was the best thing I had to work with.

At some point when I was in the Air Force, the job I had signed on to do required that I type 25 words per minute and that needed to be accomplished trying in the correct way – not hunt and peck or any of my advanced three finger variations on the theme. What was interesting was that I proved to the course instructor that I could type between 50 and 60 words per minute my way. But he insisted that as per AF regulation I had to do it his way to pass the course. After a week or so of intensive training I reached 26 words per minute the ‘right’ way and subsequently went back to doing things my way for the remainder of my brief AF career. In the process I published a 400+ page, award winning unit history and two fairly lengthy AF regulations (one training and one for cataloguing, storing and disposing of classified documents), typing the wrong way.

There is no right way or wrong way to write, though. It is as individual as your preferences for breakfast cereal or whether you drink beer, wine or water. You really choose what you need to do.

While I was in the Air Force I started using a word processor as opposed to a typewriter. Yet when I left the Air Force I continued to write on a typewriter for another six or so years. Writing was a hobby I did on my time off whenever I wanted playing father to my kids or doing all the dad projects around the house. My ex may rue the day she talked me into getting a computer for the kids. I ended up using it most of the time. After deciding it was an expensive thing to use for playing Solitaire, I began creating MS Works files of my novel in progress – something I had been working on since 1977. That began an adventure in learning everything I could about personal computers to the point I could fix darned near anything that went wrong with either hardware or software, build custom configurations of friends and eventually working a a computer technician from time to time. But a lot of that served to feed an ever increasing desire to handle my needs as a wannabe writer.

Currently I work with a old MacBook Pro. I prefer a real keyboard so I have one plugged into the USB port. And I have composed three novels on this machine and edited/revised six others in the five years I have had this computer, three of those were composed on a PC using Linux with Open Office. One my first two books were done entirely on a Windows based PC.

Although I have used Windows for many years, I am more comfortable with Mac OS now. However, I use MS Office for Mac for most things I do as a writer and a publicist.