Tech Support HELL

Kinda tricky to do that with a laptop, though, s guy.

Not completely unheard of, but alot of trouble to go through unless you're a die-hard DIY hobbyist.

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Same here! I just configured a laptop for a (viciously CUTE) admin over in Accounting, and it was like, startup, go to lunch (I'm not kidding), come back, log in, go on a deskside call somewhere else, come back, still logging in, okay, gotta restart, take some calls, still restarting, take some more calls, log in, post something to LJ, finally there, wait for McAffee to try to set itself up, take more calls, watch McAffee crash and lock, force-quit it, delete it, copy over the latest SAV, watch it install, watch it tell you it's not compatible, give up and go home... Jesus Hairy Christ, SCREW Vista. I could make Mac OS X 10.5.0 beta work on a Toshiba Satellite before I could get anything done on this!!

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lihan161051.livejournal.com

It seems like marketing folks read system requirements and think it's OK to preinstall on a turnkey system that barely squeaks by meeting those requirements. And when the bare-bones machine costs a few bucks less per unit and bumps up the profit margin, the marketing guys get their Xmas bonuses and buy their new BMW's or whatever and start tossing around phrases like "win-win" and feeling proud of themselves.

Sometimes I wish the PC world had the built-in feedback loop of supporting both the OS and the hardware it runs on. That feedback loop tends to produce machines that actually *do* work when you set them down, plug them in, and turn them on. :D Pity that's not how it works .. and yes, I've been talked into helping cute friends/acquaintances get up and running. I usually end up telling them my two favorite support mantras .. "more RAM never hurts", and "backing up is never a bad idea" ..

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Oh yeah, we didn't even let her order the thing without telling her "The first thing you're going to do is order more RAM for it." And we have at this point suggested that she let us downgrade it to XP Pro, which she's still thinking about. It's a pretty good machine but man, it does NOT run Vista well at all.

That's the only real success you can hand Apple - plug it in, start it up, knock yourself silly. That and they managed to avoid a lotta viruses and hijackware, but that's just a crime of convenience of course.

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I wish i had someone "viciously cute" coming to me with their computer problems.

All the folks i work with here are knuckledragging club-swingers.

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One of the reasons I keep coming to work; they'd have to pay me about 50% more if it weren't for all the stupefyingly attractive women in this place. Not that I'm not y'know, like, married and stuff, but nearly everyone likes being smiled at by attractive people occasionally. Most of them are married too of course.

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bien sur.

I echo your sentiments, pal.

There's nothing wrong with having some gals to innocently flirt with, too, as long as nothing comes of it. Like a harassment suit. 0.o

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I'd far, FAR sooner throw myself in front of a speeding bus than betray my stupefyingly gorgeous South American wife. Ditto screwing up my job or my relationship with these charming persons.

Not that I could convince my wife of that of course.

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McAfee what exactly? I used to do support for their corporate products. If it's VirusScan Enterprise, do a custom install and ffs do NOT install Scriptscan, Access Protection or Buffer overflow Protection.

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Not Enterprise I'm sure, it's whatever 30-day trial comes with a new $600 Toshiba laptop. Got to a certain point and gave me a white window for about 15 minutes, after which I gave up on it.

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Oh dear god, neverandImeannever use the retail shit.

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I consider 1GB to be baseline for XP, 2GB baseline for Vista. Running 3GB in my home machine, but that's mostly because I have at least 1 virtualized OS up continuously, plus a bunch of other stuff.

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Muchly agreed. I had some stutters futzing around with a copy of RC1 i snagged from my room mate, and i've got 2GB. I'd definitely shell out for another couple before switching to Vista full-time.

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I'm not afraid to say it; I have had no bad experiences with Vista thus far.

Running it with 2GB on desktop (dual channel DDR2-800 though; adding another 2GB soon), 1GB on laptop (would admittedly like 2GB but I wanted that before installing Vista). Nary a problem with it, except a couple of software vendors who were slow to release updates and Nvidia's suckass drivers that render 2D like someone's grandma is drawing each frame individually.

Vista has been well worth the time and money for me. But then, the total cost of upgrade for me was around $0. I have 100% legal, free copies of Vista Business that I put through the ringer daily. I beta-test versions for some software companies that are lagging behind, though. As far as the OS itself is concerned, so far I only have two minor quibbles that cannot be altered by tweaks.

...and what the hell ships with only 512MB RAM anymore?! Bad bad place to cut corners, that is.

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My HP laptop (Core Duo 1.83) does use shared memory, due to the lowly Intel 945 integrated graphics. It seems to chug along okay otherwise, since I didn't buy it to be a gaming machine. I've been relieved since day one that it came out of the box with 1GB.

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Toshiba, IBM, HP, Dell all ship systems with Vista preloaded and 512MB shared memory. There are undoubtedly others, as well.

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Haven't been in the market for a laptop in a while so I had no idea. Said vendors should scrutinize their base specs a little more, methinks.

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tjernobyl.livejournal.com

Out of curiosity, what benefits have you seen going to Vista? All the reviews I've seen thus far have been fairly mixed.

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For me personally, the real benefit has been to learn something new. I'm also always looking for convenient excuses to upgrade hardware as well.

We'll get the obvious out of the way up front as well: yeah, I like the Aero interface but I only use it on my desktop. Laptop stays with the classic view.

A lot of the things Vista includes are designed to help educate people about their machines. Folks like you and I won't ever use them but, for example, my wife is primarily a Mac user and she appreciated the extra info on occasion. She's no slouch on a PC but she likes poking around in Vista far more than she does XP (in fact, we just bought her another copy of Parallels so she can throw Vista on her Macbook Pro).

A lot of the features I'm most interested in aren't superficial ones and, as above, most people won't ever notice them. Memory and I/O management have been completely redesigned and upon reading a few articles it's actually quite impressive. I jacked around with Readyboost a bit and noticed a VERY slight difference, but I already have 2GB of decently-fast RAM. Utilize the feature on one of the machines folks are mentioning with 512MB or 1GB of RAM and it really does become a nice way to boost performance.

On that note, one plus was when I swapped motherboards (VIA chipset to Nvidia chipset). Even after Sysprep on the XP partition, it still blue-screened (this, by the way, is the only reason my Windows system is 100% Vista, as I still recommend dual-boot at least but couldn't be arsed to reinstall when the XP repair failed). Vista, with no prep-work, said "Hey, new stuff! *auto-install drivers* Have fun!" Also, I have swapped out all but three components of my system and Vista has not once asked for reactivation.

Most complaints I hear center around DRM. Having gone through the regular paces with my usual media, I can stay as far inside or outside of copyright and copy protection as I could pre-Vista. From my limited view (I don't do HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) I see smoke but no fire with this argument. So, this "draconian DRM" scheme has so far not reared its head here.

I see the point of UAC (Cancel/Allow) for home users, since the majority of people will never really change their installed apps all that much - these people will hardly be bothered with a few extra clicks. Folks like you and I that have massive amounts of apps (well, I do...) will want to turn that shit off post-haste. Given that the idea is to keep the average home dunce from fucking him or herself, it's kind of a "Good idea; bad execution" type of feature.

On a machine with substandard hardware you're gonna have issues. But then again, you'll hear the exact same argument every time a major OS upgrade happens. We have a couple of Macs that can't even run OS X; the G4 behind my head (daughter uses it) chokes along on 10.3; the wife's G5 is doing well fully updated but admittedly needs more RAM. It's always the same progression.

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Is it possible to market a system like this in good conscience?!

You have hit the nail on the head. Who says that the PC manufacturers have a good conscience.

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torkell

You assume marketing has a conscience.

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DAMN! there i go thinking again...

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lihan161051.livejournal.com

I don't care how popular the computer is, how little stupidware the factory installs, or how many "optimizers" they include. 512MB of RAM is not enough to run Vista well.

It's even worse when the Intel Mobile chipset splits that 512 between the system and the video.

Is it possible to market a system like this in good conscience?!

I'm very glad I wasn't halfway through a drink of coffee when I read that. 512MB .. are they fscking *serious*?! Somebody saw this guy coming a mile away. (If it had been someone I knew, my reaction might have ranged from "sucks to be you, doesn't it?" to "get in the car, I have some things to explain to these people", depending on how much I liked the acquaintance in question. And, sad to say, this will probably hit various friends of mine in a fairly predictable order, so I see some ass-kickings in the future..)

And no, it doesn't help that the chipset is eating up half of that to use as VRAM .. feh ..

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evilbill1782.livejournal.com

Amen. I wouldn't install *XP* on a system with only 512MB RAM if the video memory was shared. IMO, anything with 512 or less is Windows 2000 territory

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wibbble

We put Vista on one of our laptops at work yesterday. Apart from taking the whole fucking day to install, the (overly complicated) packaging stated that the minimum requirements included 'CD-ROM drive'.

The install media was a DVD-ROM.

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brotherflounder

Guh. My high school once had several computers running XP on 128 MB of RAM. That's even worse. I know that my poor little HP prefab would die under the strain of Vista, even with a gig of RAM.

I blame Microsoft for giving Vista's basic RAM requirement as 512 MB.

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Once, I witnessed XP Pro installed on a Pentium 133MHz. With 32MB RAM.

Crawling wasn't the word for it.

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brotherflounder

o_O;

That might actually produce the Blue Screen of Death on a regular basis. And it's damn hard to do that in XP.

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All it takes to BSOD an XP system is some faulty RAM or HDD. Bugged drivers do the trick as well.

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jecook

+ MANY.

ON marginal system, or ones with a bunch of "legacy" hardware, BSODs from drivers are easy to produce.

I have a Sony Vaio notbook that will hardlock if I play Divx encoded video, because the drivers for the video adapter (an ATI Rage Mobility with some "special" customizations from sony) have not been updates since.... 2003. Pre SP2.

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dreamatdrew

Not even a FAULTy HDD. A drive on which the partition table has been, um, barfed on slightly, eill cause a bsod.

The irony being that my mac and my *nix box looked at it and said "Um, no...this isnt right, fix it" and let me go on my merry way while windows just spazzed&diedhorribly.

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