Sunday, February 7, 2010
Geeks.com Not Such A Bargain
I used to really like doing business with geeks.com (aka compgeeks.com) because the deals were quite good. Now I only use them only when I can't find the parts elsewhere. It took 3 days before my last order even sipped, and it has been delayed in shipment. The shipping choices are overly expensive and poor. The "cheapest" is FedEx Ground which takes forever, even after the company gets around to sending out the order. Their prices are offset by the abominable shipping prices. I wouldn't care if it was slow and they offered a cheap (even USPS) choice. But paying over 20% of the product price for crappy shipping isn't worth it, especially for used products. Don't order from them if you need a part on a deadline unless you are willing to a ridiculous premium for expedited shipping. Some might say blame this one the shipping companies, but it is up to the sellers to find good option, and to help ditcate what they are willing to pay for shipping not pass the problem on to the customer. It's like an eBay "bargain" where the shipping costs two or three times the price of the product. I post this poor review in hoping that someone Googling them might find it. Oh yeah, and don't bother with the codes for discounts they never work. Their selection is what it used to be either. All in all you guys went from an "A" a few years ago to a "D". Get your act together!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Windows 7, The New Hardware Hog
I thought M$ was going to redeem itself for ME II, but the first thing Windoze 7 managed to do was prove they can't count. Some may remember back to the self name NT 3.5 and NT 4.0, then came Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), Windows XP (NT 5.1) XP x64 and Server 2003 (NT 5.2), Vista (NT 6.0) and now 7 (NT 6.1)...Wait, what? Windoze 7 is not Windoze 7? I'm confused? So what will Windoze 8 be (or not be)?
Either way I thought "7" was going to shrink the footprint, and layoff the need for excessive hardware. It needs a high end graphics card just to render the UI, and even with a lot of graphics memory, "7" like ME II takes system memory away to deal with it Aero graphics, that I could care less about. How is it Apple keeps making their OSes smaller and faster that can render a better UI with more tricks with less graphics hardware? Better coding? That's my bet. So I installed "7" in Boot Camp on a Mac Pro with an 80 GB partition reserved for it. With only the OS installed, and the requisite drivers (no updates, no anti-virus even) it took up 32.5 GB's of HD space. That is nothing short of insanity. There is no need for an OS and it's drivers to take up 32.5 GB's of HD space, especially when after I upgraded to Snow Leopard I got back over 10 GB's of HD space. That's right I got space back. What is M$ thinking? They really need to rethink their strategy. I'm sorry for the folks in big business, etc using archaic proprietary software, but you know what guys? You are holding the industry back. It is time to do what Apple did. Toss away you old OS, especially such a bloated one as Windows. Build a new one from the ground up. Add a Virtual Machine environment with XP (like in "7") for backwards compatibility (just don't require unnecessarily hardware for that VM, XP runs fine without it). Face it Microshaft, you're in bed with the hardware companies, you just want people buying more RAM, bigger HD's, ridiculous video cards, and insane processors, just to make your OS look good (which is made easier since you set the bar so low with Shista). (And since your asking it does seem to run good on a Mac Pro, but for all that hardware, it should.) Why can Linux and OS X solve the same problems and require so much less?
I also must add, that the complaints about "7's" sound support are justified. M$'s own tools tells you that you popular on-board sound cards are compatible, and to run software update to get it, well in XP doing a driver search was a pointless waste of a long time, in Vi$ta, it was one of the few things that actually worked, and with "7", nada. It doesn't even seem to try. The M$ tool said that the sound card was compatible, but after exhaustive searches for "7" drivers for your card, they won't install, on one machine I managed to forcibly install the sound drive and get it to work. When I looked at the sound card selection from the disk it seemed like only a dozen or so drivers were available, and missing were more prominent ones (must be the same idiot who took out native driver support for the most popular 3com network cards out of Vi$ta). It is inevitable after so many years of XP, that move to "7" will happen (because Vi$ta sure isn't a viable option), but it is nothing more than lipstick on a hardware hog.
Either way I thought "7" was going to shrink the footprint, and layoff the need for excessive hardware. It needs a high end graphics card just to render the UI, and even with a lot of graphics memory, "7" like ME II takes system memory away to deal with it Aero graphics, that I could care less about. How is it Apple keeps making their OSes smaller and faster that can render a better UI with more tricks with less graphics hardware? Better coding? That's my bet. So I installed "7" in Boot Camp on a Mac Pro with an 80 GB partition reserved for it. With only the OS installed, and the requisite drivers (no updates, no anti-virus even) it took up 32.5 GB's of HD space. That is nothing short of insanity. There is no need for an OS and it's drivers to take up 32.5 GB's of HD space, especially when after I upgraded to Snow Leopard I got back over 10 GB's of HD space. That's right I got space back. What is M$ thinking? They really need to rethink their strategy. I'm sorry for the folks in big business, etc using archaic proprietary software, but you know what guys? You are holding the industry back. It is time to do what Apple did. Toss away you old OS, especially such a bloated one as Windows. Build a new one from the ground up. Add a Virtual Machine environment with XP (like in "7") for backwards compatibility (just don't require unnecessarily hardware for that VM, XP runs fine without it). Face it Microshaft, you're in bed with the hardware companies, you just want people buying more RAM, bigger HD's, ridiculous video cards, and insane processors, just to make your OS look good (which is made easier since you set the bar so low with Shista). (And since your asking it does seem to run good on a Mac Pro, but for all that hardware, it should.) Why can Linux and OS X solve the same problems and require so much less?
I also must add, that the complaints about "7's" sound support are justified. M$'s own tools tells you that you popular on-board sound cards are compatible, and to run software update to get it, well in XP doing a driver search was a pointless waste of a long time, in Vi$ta, it was one of the few things that actually worked, and with "7", nada. It doesn't even seem to try. The M$ tool said that the sound card was compatible, but after exhaustive searches for "7" drivers for your card, they won't install, on one machine I managed to forcibly install the sound drive and get it to work. When I looked at the sound card selection from the disk it seemed like only a dozen or so drivers were available, and missing were more prominent ones (must be the same idiot who took out native driver support for the most popular 3com network cards out of Vi$ta). It is inevitable after so many years of XP, that move to "7" will happen (because Vi$ta sure isn't a viable option), but it is nothing more than lipstick on a hardware hog.
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