BBQ joy and computer whinging
Jun. 29th, 2010 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toothycatFirstly, thank you to everyone who came to our barbecue, it was absolutely lovely to see you all and I had a fantastic time :) At one point it felt like someone new had arrived every time I went from living room to garden and vice versa. I hope everyone had as good a time as I did, and I'd really like another one later this year :)
Secondly, whinge time (sorry! Feel free not to read ;) My laptop is getting unusable. It's a nearly-9 year old Sony Vaio, and has served dutifully and well for almost all that time. It's light, fast (for what I want it for) and rarely crashes. It's running the lovely WinXP. However, recently it's started intermittently decorating the screen with funky electric blue and vibrant red lines, which is a nuisance when reading/typing, worse than that when comicking and I can't actually imagine how bad it would be for colour work (shows how long it's been since I did any!). Serge reckons it's the video hardware; whatever it is, the computer's long past any hope of repair from Sony, so it's time for a new one.
You can no longer get Vaios running XP. Yes, I know you can get Dells (and probably other makes) that do, but a) I've found this Vaio so good, I don't really want anything else, and b) Microsoft will shortly stop supporting WinXP patches, so even if I could get a computer running it, there would be problems. Now, I'm told Windows 7 is good, and it surely can't be worse than Vista. It emulates XP so I can run all my favourite 10-year-old programs that I use now; that's no problem. But it doesn't imitate XP, so it's not going to look right, and the same is true of any Linux WinXP emulator. I like the classic WinXP interface. I like the way my current machine is set up; that I can get anywhere I want on it with just a few clicks. I also like that it does what I tell it (I get the horrible impression that Windows 7 tries to hold the user's hand. It tries to work out what the user wants, tries to understand what is meant. This is not good, because when I type 'cmd' into the Run box, that means I want a command prompt! It does not mean I want the machine to try and second-guess me! I do not want an OS to understand what I mean, I want it to do what I say, and if I get something wrong, an error message is just fine!).
I want another laptop just like my current one but with patches supported, but I can't have that. I can run Linux, I can run Windows 7. Both will emulate XP; both will let me use my most important programs. But they won't look right, and they won't respond right (although at least Linux won't insist on babying me).
Bah. I'm going to miss this computer ;_;
Secondly, whinge time (sorry! Feel free not to read ;) My laptop is getting unusable. It's a nearly-9 year old Sony Vaio, and has served dutifully and well for almost all that time. It's light, fast (for what I want it for) and rarely crashes. It's running the lovely WinXP. However, recently it's started intermittently decorating the screen with funky electric blue and vibrant red lines, which is a nuisance when reading/typing, worse than that when comicking and I can't actually imagine how bad it would be for colour work (shows how long it's been since I did any!). Serge reckons it's the video hardware; whatever it is, the computer's long past any hope of repair from Sony, so it's time for a new one.
You can no longer get Vaios running XP. Yes, I know you can get Dells (and probably other makes) that do, but a) I've found this Vaio so good, I don't really want anything else, and b) Microsoft will shortly stop supporting WinXP patches, so even if I could get a computer running it, there would be problems. Now, I'm told Windows 7 is good, and it surely can't be worse than Vista. It emulates XP so I can run all my favourite 10-year-old programs that I use now; that's no problem. But it doesn't imitate XP, so it's not going to look right, and the same is true of any Linux WinXP emulator. I like the classic WinXP interface. I like the way my current machine is set up; that I can get anywhere I want on it with just a few clicks. I also like that it does what I tell it (I get the horrible impression that Windows 7 tries to hold the user's hand. It tries to work out what the user wants, tries to understand what is meant. This is not good, because when I type 'cmd' into the Run box, that means I want a command prompt! It does not mean I want the machine to try and second-guess me! I do not want an OS to understand what I mean, I want it to do what I say, and if I get something wrong, an error message is just fine!).
I want another laptop just like my current one but with patches supported, but I can't have that. I can run Linux, I can run Windows 7. Both will emulate XP; both will let me use my most important programs. But they won't look right, and they won't respond right (although at least Linux won't insist on babying me).
Bah. I'm going to miss this computer ;_;
