Rant: Microsoft

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Jim, have you upgraded to Yosemite? I didn't have any particular problems doing it, but it definitely was a 'your computer is useless for an hour' process.

That MBP is my first Mac, and I like it a good bit. I also like Windows and have used that my whole life. I've had a few more nagging problems with Windows over the years, but that's likely as much due to 1) Sample size and 2) My MBP being top of the line specs(like jim, not my money) while my Windows machines are decidedly budget.

[jim]

Jim, have you upgraded to Yosemite? I didn't have any particular problems doing it, but it definitely was a 'your computer is useless for an hour' process.

That MBP is my first Mac, and I like it a good bit. I also like Windows and have used that my whole life. I've had a few more nagging problems with Windows over the years, but that's likely as much due to 1) Sample size and 2) My MBP being top of the line specs(like jim, not my money) while my Windows machines are decidedly budget.

I haven't but you are right, it is an hour or so I've heard. But that's a complete OS upgrade, which is different that simply hosing your computer for an hour a week just to patch the existing OS. Well not an hour, but a good 15-30 minutes EVERY freaking week.

[docellis]

Jim. you must need your computer to do things I don't. I've never encountered the things you describe. But I have encountered project ending MAC issues. 100 times.

I'm not a programmer so that might be the issue.

[jim]

The original rant was starting when I tried to install MS Office Home/Student on a brand new laptop. That's as basic as it gets. I think it's the opposite doc - I just want my computer to do a *few* things really well, and MS wants to do everything but does it in a crappy way.

My other hate for MS might be related partly to how I use computers. SharePoint is my most often used MS product, and I think everyone agrees that difficult to use absolute piece of [expletive]. Also, when I did have a MS machine for work, all I ever did with it was some Office stuff and used it to hop onto a Linux machine to do my work. Because of the environment I am in, the patches were pushed out and I didn't have a choice as to when to install them. So that obnoxious part again might be because of how I use machines, but then again I'm in the same environment with a Mac and it's much less obtrusive.

I have noticed where I work that the business-y people who like using big words and fancy charts that show nothing but look cool prefer MS, whereas the sciency-y people who don't care about that sort of stuff and are only interesting in getting work done are Mac users.

I think it goes back to a mindset where MS seems to want to do everything for you. Instead of giving people simple tools and letting them build on that, they try to give you the world and just end up confusing people. The perfect example of a simple tool that was successful was the google search engine. Remember when Yahoo and those companies were competing in that market with these categorized multi-page formats and what not? Google had a box, and you typed stuff into it, and then hit a button. It's not surprising to me who won that.

MS is on the extreme, 98% of Word/Excel functionality I never use, and when I accidentally click one of the million buttons on the various ribbon bars I can get lost forever. It starts doing weird [expletive] and I have no idea how to get out of it. And then the MS fanatics get all indignant and tell you that it's feature rich and you just need to take the time to learn to use it. NO! I just want write a god damned document, and I don't have the time nor should I need to take the time to learn how to do that.

I don't think it's me being a programmer, although some of that might make my hate for them stronger.

But make no mistake, I hate them. Especially on Monday's, because I have spend considerable time in Word, Excel, and SharePoint preparing for an afternoon meeting. Takes me hours, should take me minutes.

[Donnie Ebert]

Macs (and all the included software) are great and I love the build quality of the MacBooks, but I'm getting a little frustrated by the fact that my 2009 MacBook Pro is extremely slow running Mavericks. It just seems like they are constantly bogging down the OS (in iOS as well) to get you to buy new hardware. .

If you don't have an SSD drive, I recommend it highly. More expensive but worth every penny. That probably goes for any OS, but I don't think you'd ever have this complaint again. Any computer shop that works on Macs should be able to swap the drive and clone your data over.

Thanks for this advice. I had been debating putting in an SSD for a while, but I wasn't sure if the gains would be worth it. I bought one and installed it, and now my MacBook is exponentially faster. More importantly, I don't see the colorful pinwheel every time I open a program. I was debating also upgrading the ram from 4 to 8 GB, but since I mostly use it for web browsing, I think I'll leave it be because it is perfectly useable now.

[docellis]

I've installed that on 4 computers in the last 12 months and I haven't experienced what you did. I mean, it takes a bit, but generally, while that is happening, I am work on another task. For me, it hasn't been an issue.

[ghostrunner]

Macs (and all the included software) are great and I love the build quality of the MacBooks, but I'm getting a little frustrated by the fact that my 2009 MacBook Pro is extremely slow running Mavericks. It just seems like they are constantly bogging down the OS (in iOS as well) to get you to buy new hardware. .

If you don't have an SSD drive, I recommend it highly. More expensive but worth every penny. That probably goes for any OS, but I don't think you'd ever have this complaint again. Any computer shop that works on Macs should be able to swap the drive and clone your data over.

Thanks for this advice. I had been debating putting in an SSD for a while, but I wasn't sure if the gains would be worth it. I bought one and installed it, and now my MacBook is exponentially faster. More importantly, I don't see the colorful pinwheel every time I open a program. I was debating also upgrading the ram from 4 to 8 GB, but since I mostly use it for web browsing, I think I'll leave it be because it is perfectly useable now.

It's almost like getting a new computer, and the old platter-style drives were one of the first things to wear out anyway. Being able to reboot in ten seconds or so is pretty nice too.

I rarely had to work on Windows in my old job since it was a Mac support place, but when I did that update crap always ticked me off. I mean, we could bill for me sitting there waiting for waves of updates to complete when all I wanted to do was restart, but I'd have rather saved people the money and myself the time.

[jim]

I think it's possible in 20-ish years storage devices on computers like this will simply be non-existent. For one, everyone is storing more stuff off of their computer, and paying a little bit of money for the convenience of having someone else back stuff up for you etc... We are constantly pushing applications and stuff up in the cloud.

The other is some of the new storage devices they are working on, I was at a conference this summer and some guy from HP was talking about storage research that seemed plausible. Basically you could fit a byte of data in something like 20 nano meters, honestly the physics were beyond me but basically you spin and push an ion around to represent the memory. Not only is it fast (speed of light fast), but it's virtually indestructible. Water, fire ... whatever, stuff would still hold it's state.

...

Waves of updates and all the restarts. Very very rarely do I *have* to reboot my Mac, I go weeks without doing so. Windows it's not enough to get these waves of updates and restart, you sometimes have to restart 2 and 3 times just to install everything correctly.

It's crap. It's as simple as that.