Posted on 11/29/2023 6:42:03 PM PST by Responsibility2nd
Not if you look at the numbers. I have and found it the be cheap at twice the price.
I use a Mac.
I do have Parallels and Win7 on it for running one expensive CAD program not available in a Mac version.
Since Windows 10, what’s built-in (Windows Defender) is more than secure enough for home users. Most third-party security apps, including the free ones, are safe but worse than useless because all they do is slow your system down significantly. I’m not trying to change your mind, just making sure that other FR members get more than one side of the story.
If you really want to secure accounts you can set up a Windows domain controller on a linux server. Both are “free”- except for few days of your time. I’ve never bothered, and most enterprise customers pay for Windows Server because it’s cheaper than paying someone full-time for “free” linux anything.
“Surface” Vs “ChromeBook”............Gee who do ya root for?..............
Not surprised because there’s an interoperability agreement between all the serious players (MS, Apple & linux are the ones I’m aware of but I’m sure there are a lot of smaller stakeholders). Right now Mac will be commercially viable in a niche market for at least two more generations because it’s more cost-effective to buy a handful of Macs than it is to retrain a seasoned professional graphic or web designer accustomed to a career using nothing but Apple products.
On the consumer side I secretly admire Mac users who can afford it even though it’s just a status symbol the way they use them. They’re the early adopters that front the development costs of leading-edge tech that makes it cheaper for those of us who can wait a year or two for the previous Next New Thing to become affordable.
The only Apple users who annoy me are the University students who spend > $2000 on a Macbook, have the latest overpriced iPhone and iPad, spend at least $4/cup at the “Fair Trade Organic Coffee Shop” on campus every day and then complain about how the government (meaning us taxpayers) doesn’t give them enough help except a modest grant and they’re burdened with loans that are interest-free until six months after graduation (subsidized and guaranteed by, you guessed it, us).
That’s here in the Province of Ontario, Canada, where tuition rates are lower by several orders of magnitude compared to the US. Too many university students in the USA pay too much because the loans bid up tuition prices and irresponsible Uni administrations exploit it to the max. In the USA you would know better because even though I have been to the USA many times, I have never visited any campus let alone engaged any profs or students. All I know is second-hand at best that confirms much of what is in the media already.
As always, your mileage may vary.
Cheers,
Squawk
Not by much, I use a mid 2010 Mac the was old and cheap when I bought it...
I should have known because you were a regular on Sling’s non-ping list that appears to have been abandoned in favour of his Hopalong Ginsberg list that he had just started at least a decade ago.
Yes, I’ve been gone a long time. Based on the response to my music posts, sometime in the new year I’ll revamp my Modern Music Ping List. Stay tuned.
Only because you never took the time to explore it fully. Keep doing it your way because I’m no fanatic and I have better things to to than argue online. I’m only on this thread to make sure other FReepers get more than your side and they can draw their own conclusions; I’m not here to shill for anyone because nobody’s paying me and I don’t need much money any but I’ve been ill so I’ll have too much time on my hands for awhile yet.
Cheers FRiend,
Squawk
“Only because you never took the time to explore it fully.”
You are absolutely right. I saw the writing on the wall with Win 10 and cut that cord as fast as I could. But I am not unfamiliar with it at all. I have to work on boxes from friends and family all the time and I am reaffirmed I made the absolute correct decision every time I do.
Surface is great for those who have a business case for it.
I’m fine with my 18-month old $750 (~650 USD max) Acer 15” laptop that I use professionally as a DJ. First thing I did after setup and downloading/installing the latest updates from MS, I imaged the 250GB stock NVME drive (faster than SATA 3) with the free version of Macrium Reflect then swapped out the original drive with a 1TB NVME that I bought at the same time. I restored the partition without resizing and set up the remaining 750GB on the new drive for OneDrive local storage and repurposed the factory-installed 250GB drive as an external for which I still have occasional use.
I bought the drive plus a USB 3.0 NVME housing at Best Buy because at a total of ~CAD$250 it was a good deal. The only reason I bought the same laptop from Amazon was that Best Buy wouldn’t honour their price match guarantee when I showed them the same item on my Amazon mobile app, a manager claimed that it wasn’t the exact same product because the Amazon price was for dark grey outside while Best Buy expected me to to pay an extra $50 for a dark navy blue version of the exact same product and I don’t tolerate bullshit from anyone. I went home, ordered it from Amazon and had it at my door by lunchtime the next day.
I was ready to pay them $1000 but they expected me to give them $1050. That manager probably thinks he “won” by turning a $1000 dollar sale into a $250 dollar sale by trying overcharge me by $50. I knew it was well within their margin based on previous experience in the past as a Camera Store manager.
BTW Acer, Asus and HP are the only brands of PCs I’ve owned that have NEVER had a hardware failure despite the fact that I’ve kept using them for years beyond obsolescence.
That’s just me; your mileage may vary.
I compared the same Acer laptops at the low end, Chrome OS vs. Windows on the exact same hardware. At an extra $75-100 for the the exact same product down to 64GB MMS (slower than an SSD or hard drive) that both support up to a 1TB GB USB 2.0 micro USB card slot that automatically mounts when I insert the card. Bought it in December 2019 and still growing strong; the only weakness is that the built-in non-replaceable battery now only delivers 2-3 hours per day; when I bought it I could use it all day without recharging. Even after the battery is useless it will still be good with any external 19V-20V source which includes aftermarket adapters for at least half a decade before it’s obsolete because it came out of the box with Windows 10 but the upgrade a couple of years later to Windows 11 was free and all it took from me was one click and ignoring it for the couple of hours it took to download & install.
So my question to you: “Cheap Acer” vs. “Slightly Cheaper Acer”..........Gee, for whom do ya root?..................
Your friends still need your support for their Windows boxes, it’s probably because you never got it right. I do the same for a few neighbours, charge below market, and they only come to me a couple of times a year at most when something neither of us have ever encountered comes up. In most cases I resolve the issue within an hour and they trust me because they know I’ll get it right and I’ve trained them not to panic and scramble if I don’t respond immediately. Those customers are the only ones I’ve kept because I’ve learned the hard-way that most home and small-office customers who responded to my free online ads were so high-maintenance that I was chasing money no matter how much I charged. I gave up, got a part-time job for $18/hour as DJ/MC/Cat Herder) at a strip club (minimum wage here was $14.35 in 2015, just over $15 today) and came out ahead working just 13 hours per week with FAR less stress.
Your mileage may vary; the fact that we’re in different countries is the least significant of the variables.
“Your friends still need your support for their Windows boxes, it’s probably because you never got it right.”
Lol, that was about as dishonest as it can get. You >full well know< MS breaks their own product relentlessly without restraint. Only time I have to work on them is when MS breaks them and I have to fix stupid abusive crap MS keeps shoving down their customer’s throats. Just like what they are planning to do again in this article.
I haven’t had any of these problems at all since switching to Linux almost ten years ago.
Now in fairness let me ask you the same question you asked me. Do YOU fully understand Linux? If not then you are hypocritical by presuming I do not fully understand MS. Unless you understand BOTH your credibility of judgement is absolutely zero.
Funny, after 30 years in the profession using Microsoft, Xenix, Unix an linux I’ve never encountered anything from Microsoft that I couldn’t figure out on my own within a couple of hours- and that includes the time BEFORE they gave up on Internet Explorer even after the IE4 disaster, Windows 98 before the Second Edition was released within a year of the first version, and ME which was only adopted by me for home use where I never had a problem. I installed one copy on a spare PC at the office and quickly concluded that it was never intended for corporate networks at the time of release because Windows NT5 (AK XP) would abandon DOS for everyone because it was the final limit for supporting full-32 bit without working around the limitations of 16-bit DOS. Even now 16-bit DOS apps are supported via a user-transparent virtual DOS machine out of the box without using the command line; just double-click in the File Explorer to open immediatetely while click-and-drag to the desktop and drop it on the desktop and a Windows shortcut is created for it. Once the the app is open, one of the options when the button for it on the taskbar is to right-click on the app’s button on it and the pop-up menu includes the “Pin to Start” button. Try it once and see what happens; you’ll discover that the combination scroll wheel/centre button and the right button aren’t there as decoration because even the cheap Dollarama USB wireless mice are so cheap that they stopped carrying corded mice nearly a decade ago because there was no demand for them. Even the cheap cordless mice they sell last for years at the cost of a single throwaway AA battery once or twice a year. They’re even compatible fully with linux, and also with Mac except that all the buttons do the same thing and I never bothered even trying the scroll wheel. Protip: Duracell and Energizer are the most expensive on the market. They retail for 3-5 times the price of Panasonic for no difference in useful life or other quality issues (I’ve never encountered a leaky Panasonic).
But it’s obvious now that you’re the expert because you said so on the Internet and I hereby defer to your superior knowledge.
BTW Windows NT6 (AKA Vista) was the last major disaster for MS. They knew it almost immediately and buried it either cheap or free upgrades once Windows NT7 was readily released two or three years later having been fast-tracked because most of the planned new features were sideline in favour of getting every Vista user to upgrade ASAP and forget the disaster that was Vista as soon as possible. By disaster I mean that I spent 5 hours instead of an hour to make it stable enough to not bother upgrading until he was ready to buy a new one because Windows automatic updates were available for ten years after it was released.
The only problem with Windows 8 was that the desktop version by default opened with the same interface as Windows Mobile. It was an easy tweak for me; it was also an easy tweak for hardware vendors by changing the setup script on the client side to come up with the original Windows desktop right out of the box. Within six months all the big names already had the new ones shipped from the Far East to every first-world market.
I won’t bother with why they skipped past Windows 9 because it would take longer for me to explain it in writing than it took me to understand why it was the right decision to this day for very good reasons (it took me the time to read one sentence in an article by a professional who threw it in as an aside to a full review of Windows 10 BEFORE it was released to the public).
For a while I was enrolled in the Windows Insider Program for free because I was then set up to recover from everything including a total failure to boot just by using a free third-party recovery app loaded on to an 8GB thumb drive within a few hours without any intervention. I dropped out of the program during 2015 because I had better things to do with my time.
Bu you say I’m neither credible nor do I have good judgement so I must defer to your expertise because you said it repeatedly on the Internet more than I ever have so you must be right and I must be wrong. I’ll be away from this site all afternoon because I’ll outside enjoying some mild weather and doing better things here in the Frozen Wilderness of downtown Toronto, Canada, so for at least a day you can claim victory by thinking you got the Last Word on the subject.
Goodbye (for now?),
Squawk
...
It’s probably the best available in the USA dealing with the IRS but I don’t need to know anything about US taxes so I didn’t waste my time.
By any standard that should include your own we have a better option that you’ll only need to know about if you choose to emigrate to Canada, which I could not reasonably expect ANYONE to do on my word wherever they may be in the world now based solely on my word.
Even if you disagreed as long as you’re satisfied and don’t try to convert me to your way then we’re both good.
Cheers, FRiend
Squawk
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