WillWybrow.com

I would say that the best training you can have prior to switching to Windows Vista is a good knowledge of Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows XP.

2000 Advanced Server got me to grips with the Microsoft Management Console; a thing useless in itself but that comes with “snap-ins” — sets of settings and how they can be altered — which correspond, I am starting to think, with raw entries in the Windows Registry.

There is a directory full of these snap-ins in a start menu folder called “Administrative Tools” that can be turned on in your start menu properties. They come turned on by default in 2000 Advanced Server, and they can be turned on in 2000, XP and Vista. Some can also be accessed in other ways (right-clicking on “My Computer” and clicking “Manage” will bring up the “Computer Management” snap-in, for example).

Times when I’ve looked up how to make Vista Ultimate Edition less of a wimp and put some of that blunt Windows 2000 charm back into it — things like htting CtrlAltDel to log on, typing your username in instead of selecting it from a list (one thing you should never have to worry about, ladies and gentlemen, is what “display picture” the Adminstrator account has) and activating the built-in Administrator account — I’ve come across tutorials on the web that give you a guide on how to change the registry or run a shell command or (worst case) “download this .reg file and run it.” These tutorials might get the job done, but they’re stupid. That’s why I never used them. All the settings that you’ll need to change are found in the Administrative Tools snap-ins.

Note, however, that I’m not against hacking the registry when it’s necessary. I love finding and messing with the dirty, gritty Windows system settings to get something extraordinary done. But things like enabling user accounts or changing the logon screen just shouldn’t require so much work, especially when mentioning the Windows Registry to a user who doesn’t know what it’s all about is just paving the way to irreversible system instability.

Moving on, Windows Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out. The problems with it come when you install it on a laptop (because no laptop will ever be able to run Windows Vista well) or a computer that just isn’t ready for it. I believe that Microsoft should keep supporting and updating XP for those who are using low-end machines.

But install it on a system that is actually capable of running it and it becomes quite natural to use. Not a huge deal has changed since XP, really. The start menu is upside-down and doesn’t pop out properly, and the taskbars are a bit more shiny. Oh, and Windows Explorer now looks like IE8. That’s virtually it.

One thing I am having a difficult time making my mind up over is the new file structure for “My Documents.” Instead of one directory for all user files, there are now lots. Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music and Pictures, to name a few.

Only some of these appear in the start menu by default. “Downloads” isn’t one of them. To add it, you have to add it as a normal shortcut, and it is placed somewhere else on the menu. That’s quite annoying. Adding your own directories isn’t particularly advantageous either. There’s no reason you should create a directory there instead of anywhere else on your hard drive, which makes us less inclined to use Microsoft’s directory structure. This is a customisation option that I’d like to see — the ability to specify your own often-used locations.

At least in XP, you had one root directory, and your pictures and downloads and music went in subdirectories from there. Now you’ve got many; it doesn’t make sense to have to click two times to get to some of them, and three times to get to others. It should be all or none, Microsoft.

Finally, I suppose I should mention something about the UAC. I like it. It’ll be good against stuff that tries to install itself to my registry without my consent, and it doesn’t get in the way nearly as much as it seems to do on other people’s (slower) Vista machines.

I’ve got the Windows 7 beta around here somewhere, I think I’ll try that one next.

The next step in human evolution, guys, is polydactlyism.

Make sure you find this kid and breed with him so we can have more fingers in the future.

As promised, here is a list of specs for you all to go “wow that looks cool” or “ah man, why’d you get that shitty thing?”

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (Quad core, 3.0GHz)
• RAM: 8GB Dual-channel DDR2
• Graphics Card: ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

That’s the essentials, I guess. I could give you the model of my motherboard or the capacity of my hard-drives but they’re much more boring.

Hope you all followed the excitement this morning/afternoon on Twitter — unless you were all too fucking distracted by the weather.

Tower Complete

This is the bomb site of my bedroom about three hours after the DHL man came and gave me three boxes. Blogging from the laptop right now as I’m still setting up software. Not even got to Office yet. Wow, Windows!

I don’t really fancy doing another Linux post. It’s boring and annoying and it attracts readers from Google who know lots more about these things than I do. But when I realised my comment-response on COASM was getting a bit too long, I snipped it short and brought my ideas over here for a re-write.

It should be noted that I’m not actually going to go through everything that was wrong with that post (it was a lot), I’m doing my own thing here.

Linux and Typical Home Users: Why Switching Should Be Possible

From dealing with typical, non-technical users of PCs (be it in a work or home environment), there are really two diverse subsets of user which, I think, are distinct in how they look at, see and interact with computers. By ‘typical,’ here, I mean those who’ve used Windows their whole computing life (probably buying a computer with it pre-installed) and don’t know about alternatives to it (i.e., GNU/Linux). I can easily think in terms of these subsets because my sister belongs to one and my dad belongs to the other.

My Sister

The first set of users I’ve observed are the ones who sort of understand what’s going on. They know that when you double-click an icon, the program “loads up,” they understand that a browser and an image-editing software are distinct entities from each other and from the desktop. They learn by being shown how to do things, but also by their interactions with the computers.

My Dad

My dad doesn’t really “get” what’s happening with the computer. I figure this is the category where PC-using grandparents reside, though I do appreciate that some of them belong to the “sister” category above. This user doesn’t understand the difference between a browser and the desktop. Telling them that one “has a list of shortcut icons” and the other “displays web pages” would probably only confuse them. These users learn by being shown how to accomplish a task (printing a picture, for example) and then repeating those steps each time. Showing off how there are two or three ways to do something (copying and pasting, for example, can be done with the Edit menu, right clicking or keyboard shortcuts) hinders more than it helps. To them, the computer is like a toaster or a microwave. It’s got buttons to press to do certain things - why would there be any other way of doing it? You wouldn’t put three different buttons on a toaster to start it — buttons that are completely different from each other and not always obvious — would you?

What the fuck are you talking about, Will?

Hopefully my explanations were sufficient for you to see things as I roughly see them (even if they’re not strictly accurate — it’s incredibly simplified). Now on to better matters: why making the switch to GNU/Linux shouldn’t be a problem for either.

Just because Microsoft Windows is on everyone’s computer, it doesn’t automatically make it more difficult to learn how to use a GNU free desktop environment (I’m going to use KDE3.5 for my examples here because it defaults to one taskbar at the bottom, applications menu in the bottom left and system tray in the bottom right, like a certain Windows shell does). If you’re in the “my sister” subset of users, all an instructor really has to do is point out the parallels to that which they’re already familiar with and point out the things that are different for them. “Sister” users are going to stumble a bit at first, but they will learn the differences just as they learned how to use Windows in the first place. Yes there’s a learning curve, yes it will take some time, yes it is very worth it in terms of spreading the word about Linux and keeping your users’ systems malware free and generally stable.

“Dad” users, on the other hand, are going to be in the position they were in before they started using Windows. They’re going to need the same toaster buttons pointed out and explained to them. They can scrap their mental lists of steps of how to get things done (it’s easier to start over than to explain the similarities and differences, trust me) and replace them with new ones. If they can work Windows Explorer, they can work KDE3.5 for sure.

Windows Changes Too

If you’re really sceptical about whether your non-technical friends and family could manage using Linux instead of Windows, just take a look at some of Windows’ own changes. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know about the differences between Windows 3.1/3.11/WFW and the next releases, 95 and NT4. That look and feel stuck around for a few years until — suddenly — BAM, Windows XP.

The shift from 98/ME to XP is probably one of the most common ones you’ll have seen amongst home users. I claim that the differences a user sees between Windows 98 and Windows XP are no smaller than the differences between XP and KDE. Then if we’re talking Vista, well… the user is really fucked in that case; the shift from XP to Vista is huge in terms of user interface differences. If your users aren’t going to survive a Windows to Linux shift, they’re not going to survive an XP to Vista/W7 shift.

Ugh… effort

I know it’s hassle to teach your fellows how to use all this different stuff, but in my house, when new Internet Explorer toolbars appear on a weekly basis (don’t give me any FagFox crap - IE is so heavily anchored in Windows that it’s not possible to avoid it) and worthless daemons from Adobe and printer software and all that kind of shit install themselves without any warning, and Windows Live Messenger is packed with bloat, and malware is rampantly crawling up inside stuff and argh fuckggnkrls

Linux is nicer, it can run much better (if you configure it right) and it’s safer against user idiocy. It’ll take getting used to, but the important thing to take away from reading this is that taking some getting used to is not synonymous with impossible to adapt to or not worth the effort switching to.

Unless you ever want to play games.

02/02

Hello, internet. I wanted to ask you something quickly.

Is £1100 too much to spend on one thing? I got this idea for a computer, right, and this is how I am going to start things off. This includes everything - I’m not recycling any part of the inside of my current computer, and the only peripherals I am keeping a hold of are the mouse (because I’ve grown accustomed to this one) and speakers (because I’m not a musicfag who gives a shit about how stuff sounds). New hard drives, new optical drives, a new monitor and a new keyboard.

This being the case, I’ve looked to get all my things from one source - this minimises any postage overheads and ensures that all my stuff arrives at the same time, which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a good thing. Looking around at comparable items or the same items in different online stores, £1100 is a standard guide for what I’m looking for.

Because I’m not recycling anything, money has to be spent on a monitor and case and PSU and those kinds of things. Now, a big monitor is nice but expensive. It takes funds out of the ‘performance’ pile and puts them into the ‘looks’ pile. It’s a shame, but hopefully a 24-inch monitor will last long enough for it to be worthwhile.

I’ll publish confirmed specs soon.

You guys know about my server, right? Well, since the start of Christmas and now I have bought for it: a motherboard, a hard drive and a gig and a half of RAM. These are all to go with the processor I bought some time back that was too new for the motherboard that was in it at the time. Well, before I purchased the latest of these upgrades (the RAM), I was running on what I thought was 384MB. But it was running really awfully - the graphical installer wouldn’t load for a start; that was the first signal flag. Then the BIOS was giving me a load of issues. Turns out that I must have had a broken one in there, because replacing my 256MB and 128MB with three 512MB really did the trick.

Now the things that didn’t work before (graphical anaconda front-end, and yum, FFS), are working fine. Time to get some media on this thing and get streaming.

PEE CEE WOOORLD!!!

Hm, I got back earlier from a friend’s house. CJ messaged me telling me his laptop screen was broken, and he had an essay to write. I took my spare 15-inch TFT monitor over to his house to help him out, but it turns out that more than the screen wasn’t working. Never mind. We’re going PC shopping soon!

It was a passing suggestion that we check out some actual shops. While I don’t mind browsing shops (in fact, looking at a shelf of toys is better than an index page where you click, go back, click and go back), they are dreadfully… expensive.

As a little example of how badly computer shops rape you on the price (because they know if you’re in the shop, you probably aren’t interested in/able to shop online), I bought two kettle leads today (the standard shape power cord that goes into the back of your PC or kitchen kettle) on eBay for 99p each. Free postage.

Some years ago (and I struggle to remember how long exactly, but in the vicinity of four or five), my dad and I went to see one of my dad’s former colleagues to give her (she was an older lady) her first home PC. It was excess to requirements at home. I think it sported a 233MHz Pentium processor, and 3GB of hard drive space. Windows 98. Anyway, we either didn’t have spare power cords or forgot to pack them up, so we drove to the nearest computer shop (this was many miles from home, impossible to go home and bring them back in a reasonable time) to pick some up. One for the base unit, one for the monitor. How much did we pay? I’ll give you a moment to guess. Go on, think about it.

When we left the shop (a PC World), we had parted with fifteen pounds and ninety-eight pence. Each of those 99p cords set us back £8. Now, assuming this eBay user is making no profit (false, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose). This means the PC World markup was 700%. Now obviously this doesn’t hold for everything; if you were paying eight times the internet price for a laptop, you’d be forking out thousands, and nobody would buy them. But on the little things where nobody necessarily knows better, such as USB cables or blank CDs, the price difference is alarming.

I picture the markup of computer components as somewhere in between the staggeringly large and relatively small differences I’ve described. Probably not as ridiculous as eight times the going online rate, but certainly enough to make me never even consider buying from them, or anyone like them (Maplin are just as guilty).

Before any of you leap to the defence of these money-grabbing bastards with claims of more costs than online businesses, don’t forget the inferior service places like this provide. People employed to give advice are thick as shit, because the clever ones will say “buy from online.” A related anecdote: I knew a person who was offered a job there after answering the following phone-interview question: “what brands do you know that PC World offer?” giving a list of brand names with “Dell” nestled discreetly in the middle. Just take any remotely technical query to some of their sales staff to see what I mean. An internet favourite is the classic “how much more does a hard drive weigh when it’s full compared to when it’s empty?” Not my idea but I don’t have an original source. Google it if you want. So yeah, even if PC world have higher operating costs, it’s not nearly worth it. You’re paying to propogate false knowledge and sustain idiocy in a field that’s understood badly enough as it is.

To round things off, if anyone knows a place that’s good for cheap LCD monitors, you’ve got to hook me up. I’m all for saving energy and that, but unless someone can get me a reasonable (as in, reasonably priced) replacement for my two 19″ (a bit vague there, they’re dual 1280×1024 resolution) CRTs (we’re talking in the mid 20s for size), I’m going to have to proceed with destroying the planet. Or steal some.

Interesting fact for the day: there are thirteen pairs of parantheses in this post (including this one).

“So, Will,” I hear you ask. “What are you doing at home now you don’t have your dual-monitor arrangement for computing? How are you surviving without the convenience of dividing your activities into high- and low-priority screen time?”

The answer, of course, is that I don’t have to survive without that. You remember that old laptop I was telling you about? Well, I’ve got instant messaging on that one, using Pidgin, and I’ve got browsing at hand behind it. Then, because this old laptop doesn’t have USB 2.0, Umberto’s iPod is plugged into my other laptop (my “main” one), and I can watch the movies and TV shows that I copied to its hard drive on the other screen. It’s a really good set-up, I have the video screen tilted forward so that when I recline in my chair, I see it properly.

Just a quick update for you, I know you’re all interested in what’s going on.