They put something called paint on my computer when before I had paintbrush. It turns out paint is not as good, so they put paintbrush back and I now have both. The newer program, paint, says it will give complementary colors when you press inverse, but it gives a wide variety of colors that are unpredictable and not the same as last time. It does a lot of other things that don’t make sense, and even reverses colors (its own way) without one having to press inverse. I mean you have a picture and then you press to flip it horizontally or vertically, and all of a sudden a lot of black appears and it seems to have reversed (inversed) the colors. Paint lacks the shrink and grow option (you have to stretch it like you do any frame in any program, ie., by pointing on a line and literally pulling it out. This means that you lose interesting effects that the beloved PAINTBRUSH program had. I wrote the company a letter and got it back saying there was no such address (it is microsoft!) So I found their e-mail (which isn’t easy, and it is also hard to find their regular mail address, other than this wrong one), and pointed out the problem with PAINT, and they said thank you and that’s the last I heard.
I thought there was a rule that they weren’t allowed to make things worse, that if there was a change it had to be for the better. Shouldn’t a computer court be set up, to force these companies to serve the general populace? Now at work they are threatening to change my whole computer, by which they mean the physical box underneath the tv screen (the thing I call the monitor), and they don’t know whether they can keep my old PAINTBRUSH program or transfer it. Who can answer all these questions? I have lots of uses for my PAINTBRUSH in the art and math areas and in exploring the interesting artifacts of this program, and now this! I don’t use PAINTBRUSH just to make the usual ugly so-called “graphics” one finds in the world today. Signed Frustrated.
Is that honestly what you thought? Okay.
[thinks]
Listen, it’s too bad about your computer problem. I really sympathise. By the way, if you send me 50 bucks, I’ll send you 100 back, plus the ownership rights to the Golden Gate Bridge. That’s fair, isn’t it?
don, I have to confess that you lost me on this one.
What, precisely, is the General Question here?
If you want a real paint program, get a real paint program. Go to http://www.allaire.com and download Paint Shop Pro. Or, go to http://www.adobe.com and try out Photoshop LE. Both are about $100, and are real paint programs. Screw this Microsoft shit. You get what you pay for.
Oops, it’s not allaire.com (go there to get a really good HTML editor.) It’s http://www.jasc.com.
I think he’s trying to run an old program called PC Paintbrush. I haven’t heard of that program since the days of the IBM PCjr. It is ancient history. I’m surprised anyone is still running it. I’m even more surprised that anyone WANTS to run it.
My impression was that he was using the Paintbrush from Win 3.x, which DOES have some features that the corresponding program in Win 9x and newer are missing.
As for the anomolies with the color handling, it sounds like a video driver issue. Things like that were fairly common on Win 3.x. The printer driver and the video driver had to work together on that platform to produce the display, and made it a nightmare if you wanted to upgrade a printer driver or display driver, because EITHER could cause strange display behavior in some programs. Paintbrush was the most common to fall ill because of a driver conflict.
This makes sense, that’s what the good program was, Paintbrush from Windows 3x, which as you say, “DOES have some features that the corresponding program in Win 9x and newer are missing.” I never had any trouble with Paintbrush on Windows 3x. Here at work they put in Paint that came with some update of Windows, and that is the one that is completely worthless and unreliable, so they put back my old Paintbrush and I have both. My question was that “they” who must be obeyed and dealt with here at work say they probably can’t save Paintbrush (Win 3x) (the one I want and have, with countless saved images) WHEN THEY PUT IN NEW COMPUTERS.
The story is, they gave us these computers here at where we teach without demanding we use them or anything, which was fine. I learned from that beloved Painbrush program how to do things on the other programs, like Save As works the same on word processing. But I never could have learned it on word processing because Paintbrush shows you things more intuitively. Eventually with help I am unleashed on the internet too, as you can see.
I have no basic conception at all of computers and resent their constant changing of things and the fact that they are user friendly only to those with a gene for having a computer type brain. Let me know when they have computers that can be operated as easily as typewriters. When they work, they are better than typewriters, and the internet is wonderful, but only when it works. A typewriter works
ALL THE TIME.
I also thank the one who suggested Paint Shop Pro.
And Meephead is the first person that I have explained this mess to that understood what I was saying. Promote him to Special Aide to Non-Computer Heads–he probably has a kind of insight into minds like ours that the Impossible Computer people cannot conceive of.
Thanks, Don. I do helpdesk/tech support for a living, and have for a long time, so I have quite a bit of practice in explaining how stuff works. You’ll get the hang of it over time, just fon’t expect to pick it all up at once.
Try Paintshop Pro if you haven’t, it is good stuff, and should make up for those missing features that you are looking for.
Not to start a GD, but typewriters don’t work ‘All the time’. Parts fail, keys get stuck or jammed (this is the reason for the QWERTY keyboard computers inherited from typewriters), ink ribbons get dry, old metal parts simply break, etc. I understand what you’re saying. Sometimes software changes do replace workable, even elegant, systems with complete pieces of shit. But you have a choice of which software you use (Even if some suits are choosing what you use, you can still make the case that Paint is a steaming cesspool you can’t be expected to do productive work with.) and there are always options (plenty of them freeware or very cheap). Forgive me this rant, willard. I just get kind of annoyed when someone becomes a Luddite over one piece of junk software.
"I thought there was a rule that they weren’t allowed to make things worse, that if there was a change it had to be for the better."
No, no, no! The rules for an upgrade are:
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Change the file format. Make sure the converters between the old and new formats are lousy, eventually forcing everyone to upgrade to keep compatibility with the new users. This is the most important rule of all.
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Move half the stuff in the “format” menu to the “file” menu and “tools” menu. You can move it back a couple of upgrades down the line when everyone has gotten used to it. This will convince some people that the product has many new features, when in fact it has ONE.
3)Find the most useful feature of the current version and ruin it or scrap it completely. E.g. in the case of paint replacing paintbrush, the eraser in paint is about forty times too small.
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Take up 4-6 times more space on the hard disk.
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Make sure that once installed, under no circumstances should the uninstall ever be able to restore the computer to the way it was before installation. Even if you install, try it for fifteen minutes and decide you preferred the old version, the uninstall should fail.
"Shouldn’t a computer court be set up, to force these companies to serve the general populace?"
I had more of a totally unfair show trial in mind, with a jeering hostile crowd, jackbooted thugs and myself as the judge. Just a little fantasy…
Don:
I have a friend who only uses Paint for all his graphic needs (he makes logos and icons with it) and he jeers at my Photoshop (full version) and digital drawing tablet! He does some great stuff with Paint, too! I lament with you that MS decided to screw it up when they upgraded their Operating System. But that’s what Microsoft (and many other software companies) do all the time, alas.
I really recommend Paint Shop Pro (if you can’t get a version of Photoshop - which I guess is my personal favorite.) Paint Shop Pro has just ooooodles of options and features! It also should come with a manual (if you buy packaged, rather than downloading it) and you will want to read the manual. (There are several third-party books published on PSP as well.) I especially love the filters, or effects. They are a trip to play around with! Just open up a favorite picture, and tinker with it with the filters. You’ll get some weird and beautiful results! It’s fun.