Date Published: August 5, 2009 - Wednesday
Title: Microsoft Gets Its’ Revenge
Current mood: bummed
(While Microsoft will be the object of the ‘punch line’ of this blog, it will also deal with consumer electronics and computers in general.)
I guess I am as big a techno geek as the next guy. I have multiple computers, VCR/DVD machines and other little “guy toys”. I won’t reveal numbers because it would just give my brother-in-law more ammunition to kid me about my techno addiction.
But I do resist some of the hype that goes along with the electronics industry. I don’t have one of those ‘smart’ phones. I just want my phone to make phone calls. I don’t need it to tell me the way to the nearest Starbucks of give me quotes from the stock market.
And I resist the urge to jump when the electronics industry says “frog” every six minutes. I want a technology to be tested and proved before I will spend my money on a new gadget.
I have always hated that aspect of the electronics industry, and more particularly the computer industry, that released products which were defective in one way or another and then had to issue an ‘update’ or a ‘patch’ to correct the shortcomings of their product. Essentially they are rushing a product to the market to get the bucks and letting the consuming public do their final testing for them.
Why the consuming public has accepted this trend in electronics and rejected it in other industries escapes me.
I was slow to move into computers. Call it a kind of skepticism. I finally bought my first machine; an old IBM PC. And I was a DOS dinosaur for a long time. I didn’t get into Windows until I got a job where the company used it. It was Windows 3.1.
Over the years I would update my operating system on my computers only slowly. That’s where I differed from most of the ‘computer geeks’ I knew. I wasn’t rushing to embrace the “latest thing” because I saw the trend of releasing software with defects and didn’t want to put up with the hassle. And I believed if something I was using did the job I needed why pay for more bells and whistles just because they were available.
I still have an old laptop around the house that runs Windows 95. No, I haven’t used it in a while, but I have it. Somewhere I have my first laptop (although as much as it weighs I don’t think I would want to use it on my lap) which operated using two floppy disk drives and didn’t have a hard drive at all.
OK, I am also a packrat that never throws anything away. It’s another of my characteristics that is fodder for family teasing.
On my last job the computers were upgraded to Windows XP Pro. And when I bought my latest laptop it came with Windows XP Home.
Then Microsoft came out with Windows Vista. I resisted.
I had heard the horror stories about printers and other peripheral devices that just quit working when the user switched to Vista. Then there was the need to upgrade to more memory in the computer to deal with the bloat Microsoft seemed to include in the development of each new version of its’ operating systems. And there were the issues of vulnerability to cyber attack over the Internet because of defects in the programming code.
All this kept me from upgrading. In fact I went out of my way to buy a machine one time that had Windows XP on it when Vista was all the rage. Again this was because I believe in the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” My machines running XP did everything I needed them to do and I wasn’t going to upgrade just for the ‘joy’ of learning a new and quirky operating system and adding to Microsoft’s desire to rule the world.
I have continued to update my XP machines, now up to Service Pack 3, to keep them up to date, but I refused to spend the money to upgrade to a new system just because of some ‘fancy’ new features in Vista that played with photographs. And I wasn’t going to spend money on new peripherals or search the Internet for new drivers to make my printer work with a new operating system. For all its’ supposed efforts to make its’ operating systems easier for people to use, I just got tired of trying to ferret out where they had hidden in their latest version of Windows some of the features I was used to using.
But Microsoft has finally gotten its’ revenge on me.
I read an article on the new Windows 7 the other day and learned the bad news. Apparently this new system is faster to load, less vulnerable to Internet attack and is just better all around than Vista. But here’s the catch …
If you already have Vista installed the upgrade is just like it has always been. Just put the CD in and the new system updates things and away you go. But if you have resisted Microsoft’s hype and haven’t upgraded to Vista when they wanted you to you’re out of luck. Not totally, but you can’t do a straight upgrade from XP to Windows 7. You have to totally wipe your hard drive to install Windows 7 and then reinstall all your old programs; provided, of course, they will even work under the new operating system and provided you can find the program disks to reinstall the software.
So, Microsoft continues on its’ path to rule the world (see also the recent deal with Yahoo
