I wonder how much this blip is due to people hanging on to older computers longer because they are wary of new operating systems. I know I sure am.
For all of Windows’ drawbacks, XP is nice and stable and works well. I have no reason to leave it for Vista or especially not Windows 8. Since that would be close to mandatory if I bought a new desktop, I’m not eager to do so (yes, I know there are ways around that, but I consider them a nuisance).
I’m actually buying a friend’s XP machine so that when my current one dies I’ll have another just like it.
I think laptops with docking stations are going to be getting bigger. My company does them for all new hires, so that nobody has any excuse not to be able to work from home. Pretty much everybody has broadband, and it’s not a bad solution. The ergonomics are the exact same as a desktop at work. Relative processing power for cost is poorer unfortunately, and it won’t work very well for employees who work video as their job, but that is a very small percentage. They won’t spring for home docking stations though that is going to be my next birthday present to myself.
I have to disagree. I recently replaced my home desktop and my office desktop with laptops. And there has been zero compromise on ergonomics because I’m still using the exact same keyboards, mouses and monitors, unless I’m on travel. These laptops are both Lenovo w530, and each one is connected to 2 monitors (a 30" and a 20").
Many of my co-workers are going a similar route, replacing their office desktops with laptops but still using their 30" monitors when in the office. Most of them use Macbooks.
Of course, that’s why I bought a 3-year warranty for each laptop. But upgrades are quite easy; I’ve upgraded the hard drive and memory on both myself.
Companies aren’t afraid of employees losing laptops full of sensitive data?
When I work at home I have a thin client. All the information is on the companies servers and flash drives and printers are not supported so I can’t keep sensitive information at home, either accidently or on purpose, that could get stolen in a burglary or lost on a bus. For a while if we wanted to print something we’d email it to our personal address and then print it from our own personal computers, but the company found out and ordered us to stop.
I had to do tech support for people who had Vista*, and believe me when I share your loathing of it. But! Seriously, I recommend you try out Windows 7 if you can. It’s basically what Vista was supposed to be with the annoying bullshit (mostly) removed.
I really liked XP, loathed Vista with a passion, and love 7. I also have a MacBook that has had Leopard and Snow Leopard; while there are some aspects of OSX that I dig, I’d choose Win7 in a heartbeat.
Along with XP, 7 and even 2000 (wtf? This was 2007-2010!). Hooray for corporate IT at a company that refuses to require standardization of computer equipment and OS!
If your employee is responsible enough to be permitted to take the equipment and info home… Then they’re not going to just lose it. And there are great efforts to educate them on theft prevention and info security. It does happen, but extremely rarely. The increase in productivity is evidently worth the risk.
What is it with Windows alternating good and bad OS’s? ME was crap, XP was wonderfully stable, Vista was buggy, 7 is fine, and from the reviews, I’m not touching 8 with a 10-foot pole.
I would guess the drop in PC purchases is a combination of (a) PC durability, (b) people using tablets or smartphones instead of laptops, and (c) wariness of Windows 8.
Windows releases are like Star Trek movies, only backwards. With Windows releases, the odd numbers are good and the even numbers stink. With Star Trek movies, the even numbers are good and the odd numbers stink.
I think this is the 9th or 10th time I’ve heard “the death of the PC” proclaimed, and I don’t think the desktop is going to go away any time soon until someone develops an alternative that’s as ergonomic and functional for both leisure and work/study purposes. (Good luck writing an essay on your tablet with no keyboard and a screen smaller than a notepad - and while you CAN watch streaming videos on a smartphone, I prefer to be able to turn up the volume and not have to strain my eyes staring at a tiny screen held up to my face.)
One factor in slowing PC sales that I don’t think has been mentioned is the fact that most video games are designed primarily for consoles at the moment. Whereas in the '90s and early 2000s you had to pretty much replace your entire system every year (or at least add more RAM and upgrade the video card) to play the newest games, there hasn’t been any major forward leap in system specs since the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out in 2005/2006, and you can get away with using a system that’s a few years old to play new games. (My 2010 PC plays 2013 games just fine; just imagine trying to play, say, Doom 3 on a system that had been released in 2000, though.) There are very few PC-exclusive games anymore aside from MMOs and RTS games that require way more key functions than you can map onto a control pad, and those games tend to be on the lower end as far as system requirements go. We’ll probably see a corresponding leap in PC sales next year, when the PS4 and the next-gen Xbox come out and PC ports of their games start being released.
Also, if the information is anything that can be touched on by HIPAA, companies are now required to encrypt the hard drive of any computer that can access the information.
We went through that last summer. It’s a pain, and when a user gets locked out because they fat-fingered their password too many times, they have to call into us to be walked through an intricate challenge/response procedure, but it does mean that if a laptop is stolen, the files on it are much more safe.
People don’t need new PCs because Microsoft Security Essentials is out and it works well and is free and so fewer people are fucking their computers up beyond belief and fixing the problem by buying a new one. Or buying a new one because their computer is slow because what was really slowing their computer down was a huge Norton or McAffee product. Now things just hum along well forever.
(This is not true, I just made it up. But no one has asked me to fix or replace their machine since I made everyone start using MSSE so…)
Of course you can dock laptops… I’m just not sure what the point is. Paying more to get less so that sometimes you can haul it around with you is not a convincing argument for replacing a desk-based system you use at a desk some significant fraction of the time. But it’s all YMMV.
Now name everything else you can upgrade on a laptop, assuming you didn’t buy max capacity on both out the door. I’ll even generously allow you to add all the parts you can replace when they fail.
I think the point about MSSE is actually kinda true. My old XP laptop sped up considerably when I swapped out AVG for MSSE.
It took another leap forward in ability when I upgraded to Windows 8 for $40. I know there is a lot of bad press with Win 8, but aside from the start button, the desktop works just as it always did and pretty much like it does on Win 7. In fact it is pretty much Win 7 with a sniny secondary interface that runs apps, the same apps as a Win 8 phone and Win 8 tablet.
There are a few other minor tweaks that make me very happy, like not asking for confirmation if I am recycling a file. Permanent destruction still needs to be confirmed but not recycling. There are a couple more that I can’t think of off the top of my head…
It seems you are doing something which requires a desktop. Fine. But you are in the minority. Software development in my company is done on laptops, with big runs being done on compute servers. And you can bring your environment with you home or to meetings. (The standard configuration uses disk encryption for prevention of IP theft.)
My wife, who is a writer, finally moved from a desktop to a laptop. Same monitor as before, wireless keyboard, and now when she visits her father across the country she can get something done. She is never going back.
Microsoft used to have two separate (though related) operating systems. One was called “Windows” and it evolved out of a DOS shell type of thing and wasn’t really useful (IMHO) until version 3. At that time, Microsoft came out with “Windows NT” which had an identical user interface, but underneath the hood was significantly different. Windows was DOS compatible and allowed software to directly access the hardware if it wanted to. Windows NT was structurally different in that it did not allow software to directly access the hardware. Since computers were very slow back then (by today’s standards) things like games had to directly access video hardware in order to perform adequately. So basically Windows was the “home” operating system because it could be used for games and such and Windows NT was the “business” operating system because its extra protective layers made it more stable for multitasking (it was more difficult for a really misbehaving program to really trash the operating system). Windows 4.0 was called Windows 95 by the marketing folks, and Windows 4.1 was called Windows 98. Windows NT 4.0 (the NT equivalent of Windows 95) was just called Windows NT 4.0.
Microsoft decided they were sick of maintaining two separate operating systems, so with Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) they decided they were going to “merge” their operating systems. You can’t “merge” an operating system that allows direct hardware access with one that abstracts hardware access. It either abstracts it or it doesn’t. This was more Microsoft marketing nonsense. They weren’t merging anything. They were killing off the Windows line and forcing everyone to NT. Halfway through the development of Windows 2000 though they realized that there was just too much current “home” software that wouldn’t run under it, so they were forced to abandon their plan. They switched gears and Windows 2000 became a “business” operating system again.
This left Microsoft with a problem. They had planned on selling Windows 2000 to home users, and now they had nothing to sell to their home users. So they took the latest Windows (not NT) version 4, quickly ported over a lot of apps that had been intended for home use for the “home” version of Windows 2000, slapped it all together and called it Windows ME. As you would expect from something hastily thrown together at the last minute, it was a complete piece of crap.
Microsoft did their “merge” at Windows XP instead. By then, developers were used to the idea that everything was going to NT and almost all software written for “home” use since the release of Windows 2000 was made to be NT compatible.
In the NT line, 4.0 was ok (a bit quirky to configure some things, IMHO, but otherwise fine), 2000 was good. XP was just 2000 with a facelift (under the hood the OS is pretty much the same). Vista was a huge resource hog for no good reason. Windows 7 is actually Vista with all of its quirks fixed and a tweaked user interface to make it look like a whole new OS. Under the hood it’s not. It’s basically Vista fixed. Windows 8 still has the same OS under the hood for he most part, but the user interface has been tweaked for mobile style apps.
With Vista and 8, there is some validity to every other OS kinda sucking. XP and 7 didn’t suck because a major focus of their design was fixing things so that they worked properly. With XP it was getting all of the home apps to run on it. With 7 it was fixing all of Vista’s crap.
Now with 8 they are pushing everyone in a particular direction. If they get enough backlash from it, a major focus of Windows 9 will probably be to fix it and make it what people want, thus repeating the pattern.
that is going to be my next birthday present to myself.