Obblogatory Ramblings About Life

I’m also thinking of getting a new desktop PC and monitor (long overdue) and V’s going to use my old one as hers is really slow now. Where do you think is the best place to go these days, NOVA or Bade Rd? Have you heard of any deals lately? What would you recommend for a struggling IM guy like me?

Why not just buy an Apple pc and get dual boot Windows for the IM stuff? They’re a little pricier than PCs… or just get an off the shelf model (Xenbook) or Ultra book from Acer. They’re more than capable of running the latest stuff that marketers use.

You might be tempted to have one made for you, but I’m not so sure it’s really worth it these days. Lots of people do it, but an off the shelf PC should be fairly decent. We bought off the shelf minipcs about three years ago, all still going strong so far. And I bought a small Asus for home (now two years old), and a new Asus for my desk at school. All mini-form factors. Reliability seems to have improved for local brands a good deal.

The real advantage of building your own is the repair ability and the fact that you can customize your design much more than off the shelf, so think lots of RAM (8GB seems more than common), SSD for faster performance, low power for energy saving, and a decent graphics card for video/3D that you might want to watch. I’d swap higher gaming PC type performance for more mundane things, such as lots of RAM/SSD, pertinent things (USB 3.0), and LOTS OF DISK SPACE, esp. for back ups.

I’d also run the old PC as a backup PC for your data, JUST IN CASE.

It really depends… But

The hierarchy of decisions has to be the following. If you want to build an SBI site, you should have access to a …
1. PC or Notebook/Laptop (inc. Mac) for building/maintaining your site.
2. (Optional) If you already have a PC/Mac, and want to be portable while building/maintaining your site… buy a notebook or netbook with a slightly larger screen (ie. 11"+ is good).
3. If you don’t care to be portable, and already have #1 then buy a tablet for reading/researching/emailing but don’t expect to be able to manage your site properly (see note below).
4. If you have #1 and #2 already, then a tablet is great for reading/researching/emailing but not much more.
Don’t buy a tablet and expect to build/maintain your website, unless you can plugin a keyboard & it runs Windows or a decent OS (not iOS). iOS currently lets you do many things in SBI’s system, but you cannot edit an HTML page or a BB-page properly at all, and scrolling seems to be a problem. There *may* be workarounds, but they will not be very effective unless you REALLY know what you are doing.

Having been a Dropbox user for sometime, I started evaluating the other options from competing providers yesterday.

1. Ubuntu 1
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. Apple

Prices seem all over the place at the moment, as do service standards. Free.

The best free service in terms of space vs. pricing is Microsoft. If you have an account with Microsoft already, you can claim 25GB and go from there. However, there is currently an upper limit, and IT ONLY WORKS ON Windows 7! So if you are like me in anyway, and still managing half a dozen xp systems… well, look elsewhere! But it easily the most affordable at $25 pa for 75GB! That’s less than $2.10 per month! Affordable, limited and only on Win7+.

Google offers the biggest spaces of all the services, though prices are noticeably sharper than Microsoft. But the idea of the service is pretty good, if you DON’T use Google Docs. If you do, then all your Google Docs are available in a rather silly Google Doc format. You can download them in your chosen format, but then you can’t edit them In Google Docs, either. So integration between Docs/Drive and your PC is poor. Notch one point to Microsoft on that! Large space, broader support, and funky formats.

Apple is similar to Microsoft, in that if you use XP, you’re pretty much out of luck. It’s also the most expensive of the four I’m looking at, and if you’re not part of the Apple-verse, it’s rather pointless. The only plus is the iTunes Match service that I can see. I don’t think at the moment, Apple have much chance to become the CLOUD. And they’re flipflops on mobile-me aren’t very encouraging at all. Limited, expensive, but visually attractive.

Ubuntu One is a very interesting alternative to the big three: it’s already multi-platform – 2 OSes at least, as 2 mobile platforms (all the big ones). It seems to be everything Icloud isn’t: supported on many platforms, affordable, and there are options for music streaming, too. I have installed this (along with the others (except Apple, which I removed) but haven’t tested it much yet. The only odd thing is that there are two (two APPS!) in the iTunes store… Weird. Multi-platform, affordable, but unproven.

So I guess that leaves me Dropbox. It’s still more expensive than some of the others, but it’s already available, the technology is already tested, mature and stable. It’s available on multiple platforms (PC and mobi), and Web. You can’t view documents in Dropbox as such, so it’s not a competitor to either Microsoft or Google in that sense (wonder why Google didn’t buy them!). Overall, reliable, affordable (almost), but gets expensive quickly.

So which one are you going to try?

Wow! I’ve been using the old Windows writer way too long, and I just updated the software on my new PC, wow!

It’s got the wonderful strip bar from Office 2010~! I haven’t planned to buy the new Office yet, I just don’t need it!

But on Windows 7… I hadn’t realized what a difference the whole thing makes on Windows 7!

I use a bunch of tools to tidy stuff up on my PC. Some of it very useful!

1. including CCleaner
2. Defraggler
3. Recuva
4. Speccy

I recently bumped up the memory on one pc, and was greeted by a much faster XP pc. Not bad given this thing is nearly 9 years old, has had several things replaced, and can still keep pace with my work – no intensive gaming here! The RAM cost an arm and a leg!

Newer pcs had the same ram at 1/8 of the price! Still … it makes a difference!
Oh, and keep backing up the stuff on your hard disk (PC & MAC users both!)… those things last a while, but they DO die… or so says the stack of old disks on my desk at work!

And the other thing that makes a difference: check what starts up when you turn on your PC! I keep mine to the absolute minimum… you’ve no idea what wants to start up! Bye, Adobe, Buy Itunes… if I don’t use it every day, it doesn’t get auto-started! This speeds up both boot up and operation!

I can’t remember ever having so many crashes on any pc or mobile device since Windows98se! IOs5 on my Ipad has gone from just the occasional app crash to frequent app problems. That extends even to Safari, and other native apps.

I would expect this on a pc, maybe, from 10 years ago. But frankly, this is getting annoying. Ios is poorly bug tested, and many of the apps are worse! Ios5 was rushed out the door… And that is probably the last time I will ever be a guinea pig for bleeding edge tech from Apple.

If it crashes this often, will a mac do the same? If that does, what advantage does it then have over the PC?

Is it me or is the whole icloud just a disaster? I tried to install icloud panel on my PC… and was greeted by the statement … only works with Office 2007 Outlook? ! WTF! The only thing I could do was save my IE bookmarks to it! I don’t even use IE on my PC

And not working on XP? Well, even iTunes runs on my XP pcs fine. But icloud doesn’t. Is it because they know how BAD the software seems to be!?

I really have no way to compare, but even iTunes seems to be a f**kludge of crap. And saying all that! I still love my IPAD! But Apple doesn’t understand PCs or at least their philosophy is tangential to the world of PCs.

Is there anyone at Apple who understands how people use PCs? That they are NOT defined by ONE choice, and that even PCs mostly ‘just work’? They have taken a diametrically different approach to stuff and made some things as easy as ABC, but other things twice as difficult.

It’s ironic isn’t it… that the company that makes so many things possible still requires you to go through an intermediate step to import your bookmarks from other browsers to Safari.

I think that the mindset at Apple is that: there’s only one way (our way) to do stuff, and it always works (except when it doesn’t). And that’s quite a lot!

I always have the feeling using Apple software on the PC that there is a reluctance to make the software run well on a PC because they want people to use it on a MAC, so a lot of stuff is hobbled, poorly tested, runs slowly, is inefficient, and bloated.

This video is something we haven’t done for a while. Technically challenged as we are, we fought with batteries that keep discharging (forgot to turn off the equipment!), a faulty USB that didn’t recognize the camera when plugged in, and a slow processor! Show’s what you can do with an 8 year old PC.

Still, the quality plays back quite well on modern PC. Sorry, no HD video yet. Though that would be nice!

You can download the original. I’m not very good at the editing stuff. Would appreciate any tips!

Spent most of today and yesterday copying hundreds of thousands of electronic files from one pc to another. And even using fast copy utilities across a LAN, it is still frustratingly slow. One thing I would love to see is a kind of document management software that can compress, transfer and decompress large batches of files to speed up things like this.

I would also love a program that could scan a disk, eliminate all identical copies, then copy the remainder to one location. Can this be so hard to do? I have thousands of files and images since 1994 when I first went PC. And they’re a 100% total mess

A lot of this PC vs. Mac stuff is just phony. Many software programs are in fact platfrom neutral, esp. the open source stuff which is often available in multi-linguall multi-OS format that shames many commercial developers.

I have tried Apple software on the PC (safari, itunes, video stuff, etc.) and have always admired how clunky, slow and bloated the software is. I can see that the software might run better on a Mac, but it doesn’t make me feel at home, so I never keep it. I installed iTunes just a couple of weeks ago, and each time I use it on my NEW PC with 2GB RAM it just is HORRIBLE.

Safari just isn’t very good compared to other browsers, though it looks beautiful and typography is great. I ‘want’ to like SAFARI but I usually remove it because it just doesn’t feel right. Like wearing someone else’s shoes, in a way.

But having bought an Ipad… I might be tempted to just try the iMac or Macbooks or something similar… mmm…