Vista

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Gordon Atkinson's picture

MAC V PC - There and Back Again - Part 1

One man’s journey from the darkness, into the light, and then back to the darkness, which turned out to be not as dark as he remembered.

I wanted to buy a Macintosh back in 1991 when I sold a bunch of stuff and managed to scrape together $1200 for a computer. Sadly, that left me about $1200 short with nothing left to sell. So instead I bought a XT running DOS 3.1 with 256k of RAM, a 20 meg hard drive, floppy drives, and an amber monochrome monitor. I’ve been joined to my computer(s) at the hip ever since.

What tends to happen is you begin the journey with a Mac or a PC, and you stick with it. Mac people swear they would rather die than switch, and given how they line up like lemmings to buy whatever their Apple overlords tell them to buy, I tend to believe them. PC users, on the other hand, tend to be classic geeks and nerds, which is understandable because these are the sort of people who want to get into their computers - into both the hardware and the software. The Mac hardware and software are locked up tighter than an Amish maiden, while every PC I’ve ever owned had a case held together by its one remaining screw and 2 or 3 hard drives hanging out the side. The last PC I built had a spare CD drive in it, just so I could have somewhere to put my coffee cup.

jethro's picture

Windows Vista Tips

There has been a lot of negative press about Windows Vista, mostly undeserved, though some of the initial problems with Vista like file copy speed were a problem. However in general the Vista Operating System is a vast improvement of Windows XP in a number of key areas; Security and patching , system stability, application and driver support, plug and play and networking, user interface, and features.

vista logo One of the most common things I hear about Vista is that it doesn’t work as well or is not as good as Windows XP. In every case so far I have been able to educate the people saying this and show them just why it is better than XP in these key areas. In every case with a little hands on user training and demonstration of the killer features (like search and virtual folders), the security and system stability, wins these people over. Slowly I am converting all my clients and friends to Vista.

I can absolutely state that most of my support calls from clients originate with Windows XP machines. Almost without exception my Vista clients do not call for operating system or application issues. As a business supporting hardware installations, I much prefer selling Vista to XP, as I know there will be less issues. I now refuse to install XP on a clients machine and recommend a hardware upgrade to support Vista.

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jethro's picture

This weeks round up of news and cool web stuff

Live Mesh announces an update affecting all platforms

Windows Vista SP2 hits the streets today - Sarah has a full list of the enhancements and fixes in Vista SP2

Tony Morgan posts a though provoking piece with 10 reasons why he doesn’t like most Christians. I would agree with them all.

Rodney Olsen posted this cool video about technological and futuristic trends. I have added it here also.

jethro's picture

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 - Critical

Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

security Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.