I have fallen for this one AGAIN! I like the idea of booting up a computer and then, rather than cold booting after a break or at the start of a new day, warm booting via the snooze/hibernate button.
Well, it's a right laugh. You might be able to do that once. No, let me be kind and say twice. Then you will find that after it has been warm booted three times it cannot cope: addins stop working, even MS's own programmes stop responding and we get the blue spinning wheel of death for up to five minutes at a time, access to some apparently running programs freezes.
So, you have to restart the computer.
This comes 24 hours after the launch of Windows 7 and although I will buy Windows 7 and I have read and heard A LOT of marketing guff about the new system, I am not that confident that it will give me the kind of experience that I know the average Apple Mac user is experiencing. Don't know about Linux and other OS users but I'll bet there is a lot less frustration with other established OS than there is with most flavours of Windows.
Windows XP seemed good by comparison with what went before: I saw the BSOD very rarely, things seemed more reliable. Of course boot times are slow and they get slower and slower very quickly as you load and use your computer more and more. Against the grain, Vista impressed me by the way it did things in a better way and more efficiently too: even error reporting and recovery seemed more impressive than before. Now, this Vista driven laptop is coming up to one year old and a 5 minute cold boot is fast for it: I even gave the thing an 840Mb boost by letting Windows use a 1Gb micro drive to speed up my system. Pah! (See my post, Gatesed Again!) The blue spinning wheel of death is a more frequent visitor now.
These Windows people often promise that the launch of a new version of their products is a new build, relying on nothing from before: I think they have given the lie to that now. Moreover, things like menus that are used throughout MS products are not consistent: they can look and behave differently even within Office products let alone between Office and Window and so on.
What really irritates me is that I know from my work that even now only 25% or so of the Office population has upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007. I also know from my web stats that 90% or so of my visitors are using a Windows platform to do so.
Gates and his colleagues took the microcomputer world by storm and by aggression throughout the 80s and 90s and we are now suffering from the monopoly they have created. I wonder what will happen, what will MS do, if Windows 7 flops like Vista did and like Office 2007 did?
We need a knight in shining armour. Along those lines, take a look at the Apple iMac just announced: stunning if everything they say is true. Then look at the new mouse that comes with the system: it's called a Magic Mouse. This magic mouse seems to me to be the new iPod/iTouch: the free thinking development that makes anyone wearing a baseball cap say, Wow! Amazing! It IS an astonishing mouse that Gates and his team could never come up with. Start here and no, I am not working for Apple or anyone connected with them ... http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/imac?cid=&cp=2712&sr=em
I have mentioned before that apart from Windows Live Writer, which is just one tiny application really, there is nothing about MS products that make me think that's amazing; and I mean amazing in its true an literal sense, not in the sense that is used by people of limited vocabulary who infest our screens and newspapers now.
Rant over!
DW
No comments:
Post a Comment