Posted on 01/10/2009 6:29:49 AM PST by Bloody Sam Roberts
Microsoft servers got quite a workout on Friday from potential testers as the company opened public beta testing of Windows 7 to a broad audience– so much so, in fact, that the company decided to delay the beta's opening until it can bring more servers online.
"Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta," said a posting on The Windows Blog at around 3 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday afternoon. It included a promise to get the beta servers up and running as quickly as possible.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced on Wednesday night that beta test of Windows 7 would be broadened to the general public on Friday. It was made available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers on Wednesday.
Additionally, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) executives have planned a public beta with at least 2.5 million participants. However, apparently they didn't expect everyone to try to get in at once.
"It's starting to look almost like a land rush," said Michael Cherry, operating system analyst at Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com.
As to where to look when the broad public beta is open for business, at press time, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company is referring users to The Windows Blog.
We have a Dell USB mouse attached to one of our older Macs. We use it daily with no problems. I've used a PC keyboard with a Mac too. The USB device compatibility has been available since the iMac was first introduced in 1998, over ten years ago.
"Mac are just tools like a PC with just as many problems and shortcomings."
To the extent that Macs and PCs share some similar components, like processors and storage devices, one could make that argument for the hardware.
But software is a more important factor than hardware nowadays, and in terms of quality, Microsoft Windows is a steaming pile of horse crap compared to Mac OS X.
Even with the “common” hardware, there’s differences. As I’ve written before, the “high reliability” and longer warranty hard drives that other brands make you pay extra for are *standard issue* on Apple hardware. It only goes up from there; Apple consistently chooses the higher or highest grade of hardware in each category.
Due to volume, they often are able to buy the parts cheaper than you can assemble them out of a catalog. I know a couple of years ago, I priced out just the *parts* to make a duplicate of a Mac Pro tower from commodity components, right down to identical or near identical grades of parts; the parts *alone* were a couple of hundred dollars more than the assembled Mac Pro. (This is how Apple gets away with their average 8-year usable life span - the machines just *last*.)
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt... they are either ignorant, or relying on someone who is ignorant, of Macs and their capabilities.
"We loaded Office for Mac and every time we turned on the computer Word opened automatically which was very annoying."
It sounds like someone added MS Office to the "Login Items" in System Preferences/Accounts. If so, it is easy to undo that by removing it from the list.
"We found out neither Napster and Rhaposdy applications would run on the Leopard OS and Mac Mail hijacked all our emails from our ATT/Yahoo account."
Considering the miniscule marketshare of Napster and Rhapsody compared to iTunes, that isn't an issue for most users. For the tiny population of Mac users that want those two services, the solution is to install Windows on the Mac.
The behavior of Mail.app is controlled by the user's settings, so it's difficult to understand how it can "hijack" a mail account. If I were having a problem with it, I'd change the settings.
"If you want to play around with pictures or do grade school projects and posters, and like being told what to do and how to do it get a Mac. If you are computer literate, want to do real adult work, and want to have options and customization potential get a real computer running Windows."
Those statements are so misinformed, it difficult to know where to start.
Blessings on you and yours for being so patient
with those who think they are buying
a new toaster at best buy.I have installed, repaired, configured and used
computers and networks for almost fifty years.I've worked on the very largest to the very smallest.
I've worked on hardware, software and firmware
Spent the 80s in Bell Labs as an MTS with
a world class computer sandbox.My degree is in Cognitive Sciences
studying man/machine interface.I think OS X is the slickest GUI I have ever used
and OS X is built on BSD, designed for DARPA
for use on the internet and subject to hostile attack.There are trolls and snarky folks who will
always argue to prove their own existence.OBTW if anyone with VMware Fusion is interested
they can download windows 7 as a Virtual Appliance.Those of us who know computers, support all you do.
Apparently for those who WRITE IN ALL CAPS.
I used Wordstar on a CP/M machine for my word processor during my freshman year of college. I know what I'm talking about when I say, "Pffffft."
So you would be familiar with the works of people like Don Norman, Brenda Laurel, Lillian Schwartz, Aaron Marcus, Bruce Tognazzini, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, etc.?
Thanks, it's good to be appreciated.
Funny you actually did finally show up to this thread I pinged you to, and funnier still is you keep towing the Apple line even when this thread IS about Windows 7. Why are you here exactly and what is your experience with Windows 7?
You mention this 79 year old woman that has been cursing Windows for 15 years. I'm sorry but I am going to call your bluff on thagt. I consider myself an advanced user of Windows and I have never "cursed" at Windows, never mind continually cursing at it for 15 years. Who are these dopes you are meeting that have this amount of ineptness to "blame" a computer because they don't know how to use it?
I will also call your bluff this so called 79 year old woman was using a Windows computer for 15 years. Let's do the math. 1993 she bought a 386 for what purpose exactly? She would be 64 years old and out of the blue, some random grandmother would buy a computer when they weren't exactly mainstream and email wasn't even a standard back then. Like I said I consider myself an advanced user and even I didn't have a 386 or even email in 1993, and I've had computers since I was a kid back in 1980.
Why am I here? Did you, or did you not ping me to this thread?
I have not said one negative thing about Windows 7. I am responding to ignorance and FUD about Macs.
I will also call your bluff this so called 79 year old woman was using a Windows computer for 15 years.
So you are calling me a liar? That makes you an idiot.
There is no bluff. I don't lie and I don't bluff. What I said was factual.
This particular woman was hired to be the Business Manager of the Stockton Chorale after she retired from teaching high school at age 60. She had been assisting the Conductor's wife who had been Business Manager since its founding in 1951 until the conductor's and her retirement in 1990. This woman was also one of the eight founding members of the Chorale. They were originally using DOS but switched to Windows 3.0 in 1990 and DOS with Wordperfect to manage their donor and singer member databases. She decided she needed a home computer and bought a Compaq for her use.
When she retired from working for the Chorale at age 70, she continued volunteering at the Chorale office and also doing the bulk mail labels and managing the mailing lists from home. She finally completely retired from working for the Chorale last year. She now uses her computers as the Central California coordinator for the Funeral Consumers Alliance and maintains a database of their current and deceased members from her home using Excel. She also is a member of several on line Astrology groups and enjoys doing astrology on her computer. She also uses computers for emailing her extended family. Every three to four years she bought a new computer. Her last one was a two year old Dell with XP, just out of warranty.
Over the years, her computers continually slowed down, and she had to re-install the OS. She was infected at least five times with in the past seven years with various forms of malware.
In October, her computer died a horrible death, complete with the magic blue smoke getting out. She called me and said she was tired of fighting with Windows and had decided to take my advice and buy a Mac. I took her to the Apple Store in Sacramento where she purchased a Mac Mini. She had trouble believing that such a small thing would do everything she needed. We installed Parallels Workstation on it because one of her Astrology programs was only available in a Windows format and I set it up so that program runs transparently within OS X as though it were an Mac application. She called my just a few days in to her learning curve with her Mac to tell me that for the first time in years she was having fun with computers. She has repeated that statement at least weekly since. I have had only two training sessions with her... and most issues she runs into, she solves herself. She is very happy with her new Mac Mini.
To my chagrin, she is a flaming Liberal and voted for Obama. We have agreed to disagree.
I’m downloading now, getting about 350-450 KB/sec. I’m glad I didn’t hit the initial rush.
I’ve actually heard good things about this so I’m going to try it under VMWare Fusion on OS X.
That sounds good. It keeps consistency. One of the failures of Vista was that a large number of systems couldn't run the new interface and defaulted to a much cheaper one.
With everything there are lemons. The goal is to keep the lemons at a minimum and have support that's good enough to get people through the problems. Looks like support worked for you.
We were limited on screen resolution to whatever Mr. Jobs thought appropriate.
LCD monitors have a maximum resolution, and the 24" iMac is limited by the LCD to 1900x1200 (2048x1536 for external analog). I have options all the way down to 640x480 on the internal LCD.
We loaded Office for Mac and every time we turned on the computer Word opened automatically which was very annoying.
Did you have "Open at Login" checked for Word's Dock icon?
We found out neither Napster and Rhaposdy applications would run on the Leopard OS
Fault of the publisher.
Mac Mail hijacked all our emails from our ATT/Yahoo account.
I don't know what you did, but Mail didn't hijack anything for me. I used Thunderbird on OS X for quite a while before switching (on purpose, no hijacking) to Mail.
I could go on but it suffices to we repartitioned, loaded Vista and have had no problems since.
My iMac is also the best Windows XP machine I've used.
If you are computer literate, want to do real adult work, and want to have options and customization potential get a real computer running Windows.
Let's check the criteria.
Computer literate: Do you mean if you like constantly troubleshooting? Yes, get Windows. If you mean being able to exercise your 5k1llz, you have the full power of BSD UNIX under the Mac including a wide choice of shells and scripting options. Windows doesn't come close.
want to do real adult work
I guess that would depend on your exact requirements. Everything I need to do "adult work" is available on the Mac. If your adult work is professional-grade video, you really do want to be on the Mac. Avid is about the only real Windows competition, and it's not quite as good.
and want to have options and customization potential
I like my options and customization on the Mac. Of course I've never been into serious customization even on Windows because it usually screws everything up. But if you want options and customization, you need to go Linux.
get a real computer running Windows.
Certified UNIX or a system running on an over-glorified Windows 3 API from DOS days. I think I'll call the Mac a real computer.
I have installed Windows on literally hundreds of machines, probably over a thousand. The install on a Mac was by far the easiest install ever, no glitches, no driver hunting, nothing. After the install my iMac has been the most stable Windows machine I've ever used. If I just wanted a Windows machine I'd still consider the Mac, not even counting the superior industrial design that goes into them.
With Windows you get the blue screen of death with Mac you get the spinning beach ball of death. The difference is that with a PC you can go Con-Alt-Del, get to task manager and fix it, with Mac you call Apple support.
You called Apple support because you didn't know the equivalent. One of the first things I did was print up the keyboard shortcut list for the Mac. Command-Option-Escape brings up the Force Quit windows. You can kill any apps from there. And this is real force-quit. It works, it absolutely kills whatever you want (UNIX kill -9 is powerful). It doesn't hang around with you trying to kill the same app 20 times through Task Manager.
Holding down Command-Option-Shift-Escape for a few seconds will automatically kill the foremost application.
If you want to be more specific and be able to kill daemons ("services" for Windows) then bring up Activity Monitor.
If the screen itself is hung then you can kill Finder, which will restart just like Explorer restarts in Windows. I've never had anything hang Finder irreparably, but I have used this to stop it from taking way to long to build a thumbnail of a WMV file (although I think that's VLC's fault).
but you shouldn’t have to learn a “new paradigm” when you switch computer brands
If the current paradigm is broken as Windows is, I'd sure hope you have to learn a new one if you want anything better.
For reference, I'm an expert Windows user, admin and developer, and I started on Windows 286, DOS before that. I just switched in 2007 and have been loving it.
They make a $3,000 iMac? Maxing out RAM and HDD and getting the extended warranty isn't even $3,000. You must be talking about the Mac Pro, which competes with the Dell Xeon workstations, but at a usually lower price than the Dells.
The Tog, my hero. My degree isn't in the same thing, but I made sure to take enough classes on the subject during my CS program.
I forgot to include Douglas Englebart in that list. As you probably know, he invented the mouse at Stanford.
Many Microsoft OS users, especially the self-proclaimed “experts”, are generally opposed to anything that doesn’t come from Microsoft. Many of them expressed fierce opposition to the mouse back in the MS-DOS era. “Real men use the command line”, they said. But when Microsoft started copying Apple’s user interface, their complaints disappeared. Today, some Windows users believe that Microsoft actually invented the mouse.
Windows suddenly decided my copy of Vista was a pirate. Could not get it to authenticate so it crippled it (no printing, no control panel, no way to update). Finally had to wipe and start from scratch. Great, 3 days of my life gone trying to recover. Today it uploaded Vista SP1. It installs it and, BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.
Thanks Bill, I’m gonna pass on the Windows from now on. My next computer will be a Mac.
Get linux, it’s free, and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
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