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May 19, 2007

Followup to "My Somewhat Lame New Computer"

While I was cleaning up comment spam, I realized that some of you were actually attempting to have a followup conversation to my "My Somewhat Lame New Computer", despite the hail of spam that was surrounding it. I cleaned up the post and apologize for being negligent there (normally posts don't get spammy until after the real discussion ends).

So, here are some of the later comments and my reply:

DMB commented, "Dude. Just buy a Mac. Why would anyone subject themselves to Windows torture these days is beyond me. Unpack it, turn it on, and it just works." My wife has a Mac and makes similar comments occasionally as I pound my head in frustration (the two computers are in the same room). But, there are also times where she can't figure something out, and I feel the Mac is less diagnosable than Windows, or at least I know less about diagnosing it (it may fail less often, but when it does it is harder to get out of). Plus there are times when she has to come over to my machine because such-and-such app doesn't run on a Mac.

Bob wrote, "didn't LRCC.com recently start offering XP again as an option ?" Well, of course DELL and LRCC happen to both be four letters and have a repeated final letter, but far be it from me to state that LRCC actually was Dell...anyway I did hear that Dell was installing XP again on certain machines. But one of the points of buying a new machine was to get it all preinstalled, I don't want to format and start over.

Anon said, "I too am experiencing those once-a-day machine freezes on vista. I noticed that freeze is usually followed by an unusually high disk activity. Any ideas what could be causing this?" Well, my once-a-day freezes are gone. What did I do? It gives me no particular pleasure, as a Microsoft employee, to report that what I did was stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox (which I had previously done on my old computer also). I tend to leave browser windows open for days and days, and making that change that fixed the problem (literally overnight). I don't know why it fixed it, and actually I suspect that what was hanging IE was some third-party plugin that LRCC had larded onto my computer (because on my Vista computer at work I also leave IE open for weeks and haven't had a single problem)...but that's the fix I was able to make. I work at Microsoft so possibly I could have installed a debug version of IE and sent back some info to the IE team to help debug it, but as a real home user of course that would have been impossible.

Wesley Parish said "I think I can see why people wait for the first service pack before they consider Microsoft OSes to be usable. I feel amply vindicated in not buying a Vista-ready computer - yet." I have heard this, but since I had a great experience with Vista at work, and my home computer dated from the Bill Clinton era, I was expecting it to work well and was surprised that it had so many problems. The kind of situations a service pack will help is the hardware combos that don't exist in Microsoft's labs, which happen to fail in the field when used together. In this case I had bought a preinstalled computer from a major manufacturer, which was offered with a fairly limited set of hardware options which I hadn't changed at all; they had had many months to test their hardware with Vista before they started shipping machines. Perhaps I have a warped view because I work at Microsoft and tend to run all kinds of beta, alpha, and earlier versions of our operating systems with no problems, but I was not worried about the stability of v1 of Vista.

Wesley also wrote "(BTW, do you have something to get rid of all the comment spam? It's nauseating.)" and Max followed up with "Isn't it kinda sad that a blog run by an employee of the world's largest software company is nothing but a dumping ground for spam?" Well, it is both nauseating and sad, although I'm not sure what working at Microsoft has to do with it, since I run Movable Type. I have been busy working hard to promote engineering excellence at Microsoft so the world's largest software company can make great software; this takes away from the time I can spend nuking comment spam. I probably should install an MT addin to filter spam, or hack up the app myself to filter out certain kinds of comments (like those with http links in them), but I just haven't done it yet.

Posted by AdamBa at May 19, 2007 08:45 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Ivan at May 20, 2007 05:17 AM