h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, it crashes almost daily, but coming to think about it, there are hundreds of things that can go wrong, but don't. (Positive thinking, always positive thinking...)

Yeah, my faithful IBM with windows 98 (or something...)

And trumpets. Trumpets are so lovely and wonderful designed, easy to use, nice to look at, and makes a good blast now and then. (Hey, guess what instrument I play!)

Things that don't work: Printers. I never got the hang of printers. "Can't continue - error in *something*" - "Put paper in" - It IS paper in there, stupid printer. Lots of it!

*sigh* That's why I always have a pen and some paper near the screen...

Printers are the most evil of computer paripherials, our network at work is constantly bogged down by old print requests because it is always running out of paper, jamming, or having "acceptance" problems... It just dosnt fit in...

My Computer is great, it allows me access to all this WWW stuff. The Phone Bill however.... Well less said.

I agree about printers the Devil designs them with paper trays that run out one page short of whatever you are printing, and how can ink cartridges be so expensive, I bought a new printer last time one ran out, it was cheaper.

Amen to that! it was almost 100 dollars for a new printer head and the printer had dropped in price it was around 110... hmm... 10 more dollars and I get a whole new printer... hmm.... YAY! no... They also warp your paper if you have a bubble jet printer... it makes it all wavy and stuff EWW cant turn in a report like that no siree bob!

i agree about the printers. mine is very weird. if the printer is switched on before th computer, then when the computer is switched on, it tells you that there is new printer software o install, or something rubbish. very weir. and it is constantly telling me it has run out of paper when it blatently hasn't.
^. .^
= ' =

Oh boy, hasn't ANYONE heard of Mac? Don't get those problems with a Mac. This is a sterling example of good design: hardware and software work together for optimal efficiency and ease-of-use. I guess some people have to learn the hard way.....

Fruitbat

I absolutely LOVE all of my computers. I never feel like hitting them or calling them stupid. When I need to use my computers (which is quite often, as I'm a software engineer, as well as a dabbler in webwork and graphic design), I can always get stuff done.

Guess what kind of computers I have? They're all Macs.

I never yell at my computer, if you get upset it locks up more. I love the scanner I got... the most lovely input device(I got to beta test it) it worked so well it is the opposite of a printer... guess what? after I hooked up my printer to it (an hp just like the scanner) everything worked really well! The other printer was for my first computer... a Cannon BJC-600 YECHH. I love my HP periphrials. Also, the last time I used a Apple/Mac it took half an hour to scan a small photo about 3 inches across... hmmm I hate macs... AND it locked up EVERY time I wanted to change the picture in Adobe. I have the same progam on my computer and it has never given me a problem...

Fruitbat, when I was at college doing my HNC in Computer Graphic Design and Production, all my work was done on Macs. Every one of them cost more than the PC I had at home, and each ran slower. After giving up on the college's CLC-10 professional inkjet, because it cost £2 to print an A3 page and screwed up about 2 in 5, I took my files to a friend's work and printed them on an Epson Stylus XL with SoftRIP. Guess what; it took 45 minutes per page in "quality" mode, and screwed up about 2 pages in 5. At least they weren't always the same pages as the college printer screwed up.

My general impression, based on the Power PCs at college, and the G3 with all the trimmings at my friend's work (which was pretty similar in speed to my dual-Celeron system at home) was that Macs are just as slow and frustrating to use as PCs, but, having spent so much more on them, the owners are just too embarrased to admit it.

I have a Power Mac 5215CD, original price $2500 approx. I paid £30 for it, upgraded the memory from 8MB to 32MB and now mainly use it to play CDs while my PC is doing the real work. Sadly, the drive can't read an audio disc longer than an hour...

The only Macs that count are post-G3 Macs, in my opinion. I didn't spend all that much money on my dual-533 G4, and it performs flawlessly...burns CDs, runs Photoshop 6, runs my Epson printer, my Wacom tablet, my new Canon scanner, with no problems. Programs start in no time at all. It's really not fair to compare 5-year-old Macs with modern-day Celerons. If that's the comparison we're making, I could say that all PCs are crap because my old Compaq Presario 133 Pentium was a sucky heap of crap, but that's mostly because Presarios are sucky heaps of crap and not because PCs in general are. Also, the thing is five years old.

A fair point, but the G3 and the Celeron system were both the same age. The point I was making about the 5125CD was the degree to which Macs lose their value, and the relatively high initial costs of owning them - it has a performance somewhere between that of a P90 and a P100, was around at the same time as those CPUs, yet probably cost a third more as a preconfigured system. That's compared to the likes of Compaq, who are overpriced anyway - if, like myself, you build your own, you can knock another third off the price of your PC. That option just isn't open to Mac users.

Yeah, I'm running a Dell 8100 with 1.4 gig processor, 40 gigs hd, 256 megs ram, dvd drive, cd-rw drive, zip drive, 3.5 drive (which has yet to be used), altec lansing thx-certified DD 4.1 speakers, and something like a p780 trintron monitor (also thx-certified). Now if only I could figure out why my modem connects to my isp only when the the line is in the wrong half of the modem (at least according to the manual), and why it only connects when I pick up the phone before dialing and leave it off the hook until it's logged on. That, and I need to rebuild my OS up to Win 98 SE--I don't like Me or XP, both of which I had no choice on.

Asterion,
Different modem brands can have slightly different cabling - there are two main standards, one which has all the wires in a "straight-through" configuration, and one in a "crossed over". Dell may have inadvertantly supplied the wrong cable for the model of modem in your machine. Alternately, are you using a telephone extension lead? I read an article last year where Jerry Pournelle was having similar problems that he traced back to a cheap moulded telephone extension which crossed the connections over internally; this didn't affect the operation of a telephone or slow fax machine, but screwed up a modern modem. If you are using an extension, try it with the modem plugged directly into the wall - just a suggestion.

Ah old modems what lovely contraptions... YECCH I hope I dont have to go back to using one from the connection I have now...

My Dell 8100 came with a pass through connector that you connect your phone in one bit and the lead from the wall socket in the other and the whole Y shape bit then connects into the back of the PC.
This allows you to recieve incoming phone calls when using the internet. Quite clever....but it also took me 2 days to figure out which wire goes where.

what fun...

Hi Peet,

Unless you own your own machine, Institutional systems are notoriously ancient because the facility simply won't upgrade them every time the technology changes....about every six months. My G3 is a 266 Hz and has a Power PC chip in it. Other machines I've used with the same chip in them are ponderously slow compared to mine...which is impossibly slow next to a G4, with or without the velocity engine.
Also, college and university machines are frequently used by many people and de-fragged irregularly at best. This leads to all kinds of junk being left in the machines by lazy students and faculty who don't clean off the harddrive often enough. That'll slow down the performance.

Across the board, Mac was designed to provide a consistent look and feel to the machine: someone can go from the earliest 64k machine to the newest G4 and be able to find their way around inside of a few minutes because they operate the same way.....just faster and more powerfully.

"My general impression, based on the Power PCs at college, and the G3 with all the trimmings at my friend's work (which was pretty
similar in speed to my dual-Celeron system at home) was that Macs are just as slow and frustrating to use as PCs, but, having spent so much more on them, the owners are just too embarrased to admit it. "

I cannot speak to your experience because I'm completely unfamiliar with the progress of PC. While I started off on a 286, moved up to a 486 which then turned into a Pentium 100 when the Motherboard arbitrarily blew up (after 3 replaced harddrives), I had to switch to the Mac for a college course....a direction I was heading in anyway after my Windows experience....I've never looked back. My 266 G3 now has 288 megs of Ram, a 10 gig harddrive and still performs perfectly while connected to my Epson Stylus 740 Inkject printer. My beast isn't fast by G4 standards but it still consistently delivers the ease-of-use Mac is famous for and a stable OS to make it all shine.
I'm almost smug about owning a Mac while others still thrash about with PCs...I know how this beastie works and have had enough contact with the PC world to know that I don't want to go anywhere near it.

I appear to have brought the Platform Wars to this forum, which, while inevitable, was not my intention. I simply maintain that the Mac is a superior computer from a design and execution viewpoint and user experience. Those who love PCs can keep them....after all, if it weren't for Windows, Mac might not have been needed.

Fruitbat

Fruitbay, re: "if it weren't for Windows, Mac might not have been needed"...

Ironically, fyi, both systems were attempts to implement research done at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) into producing an object-oriented GUI. The initial differences between them was each company's attempts at making it *just* different enough so that they wouldn't owe Xerox any royalties...

On the Apple side, Steve Jobs "appropriated" the ideas after going on a tour of PARC, and incorporated them into the "Lisa", Apple's precursor to the Mac series. On the PC side there were four main contenders to the same idea - Microsoft's "Windows", IBM's OS/2 "Presentation Manager", UNIX's "X-Windows" and Digital Research's "GEM" (Graphical Environment Manager). GEM died out on the PCs after the age of the Amstrad 386, but carried on as the front end of the Atari ST, TT and Falcon ranges. IBM hired Microsoft to rewrite Presentation Manager, so it eventually incorporated much of Windows' technology.

UNIX's X-Windows has become popular amongst Linux officionados, with a range of "desktops" which can emulate GEM, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, amongst others. Ironically, as I understand it, Apple's OS-X is basically a Power PC Linux variant, running X-Windows set to emulate the Mac OS! (with a few improvements in the user interface)

Sorry, Fruitbat - that typo made you sound like a citrus auction site...

Macs= Somewhat easyer to use, but rigid
PC= Freedom to change, requires fiddling and a calm collected peronality...

I like to talk to my computer rather than yell at it, I have never had one problem with my computer other than changing the autoexe.bat to somthing that made my computer go forever in a loop... boot... until it got to that command line, boot and again... Oh and I forgot my password which meant I lost all my restored photographs I had done that week for my mum's birthday.