Going back to the OP: doesn’t anyone else think it is more than a little scuzzy of Scott Adams to allow this ad to run on his page? It flat out lies to people about their computers, and it meant to scare and mislead people (okay, not-particularly-computer-savvy people, but aren’t even not-particularly-computer-savvy people still people? If you prick them, do they not bleed?) into signing up for some product/service whether or not they need it?
Does he really need money that badly?
Sure, but I’ve had the same kind of fun with Apple’s own wireless keyboard and mouse to a Mac Mini, or getting an HP printer to work with a Mac Mini.
Apple has their own special kind of hell produced by Steve Jobs’ mental illness. What the FUCK is wrong with screws! Why the FUCK do I have to use a fucking PUTTY KNIFE to open a computer to add RAM?
Best investment a machead or a computer guy who knows macheads can make? Torx and Security Torx screwdriver sets.
This also applies to Sun and high-end HP kit too.
They might not know. I got one of those fake antivirus extortion things from an ad run on this message board a few months ago (what I would give to get my hands on the people that do these things :mad: ). There was an ATMB thread about it, they found the problem and pulled the ad.
I dunno. I’ve been using Windows Vista for…what, year and a half now, and I haven’t had any major problems with it.
Scott Adams is a businessman as much as he is a cartoonist and a writer. Of course he has ads.
What you’re talking about is a popup sales webpage that has fuckall to do with whether or not someone’s computers has a virus, so what makes you think you’ll never see it on a mac? I’ve blocked the url to one of the versions of that page and if I copied the url from the block list and posted a link, I bet you could see the same message on your imac too.
I guess I could see it on the mac. Or, at least, for all I know I could (then again I haven’t seen ANY popups so far). But at this early date I still think I wouldn’t have any reason to worry, if I did. I have certainly had virus problems on PC’s - the worst was when I was running Norton and AdAware and Spybot and ZoneAlarm and Webroot and SpywareBlaster, all while connected through a router plus a cable modem both of which said they amounted to firewalls. I still got a virus that created such a mess I couldn’t even fix the PC myself and had to leave it at a shop for an entire month.
I am sure plenty of people will think they know better than I do how to set all these things up, and perhaps they do. The bigger issue is whether a person should want to, should need to.
While not a full time coder, I have programmed in well over a dozen languages on IBM mainframes, CPM and DOS and Windows Win32API and .Net, and BSD and SVR4 machines, and worked with hardware interfacing and networking and a bunch of other stuff, since the mid '70s. If making (under duress) a minor hobby out of computer security still leaves me without systems I can count on, something is crazy wrong with the world.
I am sure people CAN survive barrel rides over Niagara falls, but note that generally they don’t NEED to!
Sounds like you need to find a more competent computer shop.
I’ve never encountered any virus or spyware that will survive the hard disk being pulled from the host computer and scanned via a second computer. Invest in a USB IDE/SATA cable adapter, mount the drive, plug it into a second computer and run a good anti-virus program, doing a full scan on all the files in the drive.
But, wouldn’t that be insane?
Huh? A computer shop that can’t pull a hard drive out of a computer isn’t worthy of being called a computer shop. One could boot onto a cd, and run a scanner from there, but you’d have to burn a fresh CD each time to be up to date. You don’t even have to pull the drive - I’ve just opened the case and unplugged the cable, plugged in my own cable from a laptop and powered the desktop up.
Naw, not really, it’s a routine part of my day these days (of course, I’m responsible for a few over a hundred machines on a daily basis. =P)
I’d completely disagree with you. I work in retail, and we sell ink. Brother users hands down complain the most about the frequency with which the cartridges have to be replaced and the on-going running costs. Lexmark users complain most about the high cost of replacement inks. Epson users are the most likely to look for a generic cartridge, despite the comparatively low per-cartridge cost of many of their inks. HP users complain mostly about poor service if their machines develop faults within the warranty period. I’d recommend a HP before a Brother (particularly if the customer wants to print photos), and a Canon over both.
What are your thoughts on color laser, while you’re here? In my experience HP and Dell are both pretty unsinkable once you got to the $1k+ range of workgroup printers, but I’m being sold a Sharp for a workgroup printer/copier/fax solution in the $9k range to serve a 30-person group.
I understood you to be saying that I should be doing this. If you meant the shop, then it sounds perfectly plausible.
If you can pick up a Phillips screwdriver without poking a hole in yourself, you can pull a hard drive. I’ve talked my wife, who is a non-techie, through replacing her own power supply - over the phone. That is several times more difficult.
Ahh, now that is out of my realm of experience. We deal in the lower end colour laser printers for sub-$1000 so I can’t really comment on the sort of thing you’re looking for, sorry.
I have probably moved drives between computers, or tried, 5 times and don’t think it’s that cut and dried. First, aren’t there more than one method of controlling which drive is the boot drive? Besides, I’ve had hard drives with funny cable arrangements, and vaguely remember something about two wires in the cable being crossed to counter some unfortunate historic choice about booting order, and a switch or jumper somewhere on the drive to optionally switch that back. I think there are several different kinds of hard drives. Some systems require several other things to be replaced - I have a system at the office that has about 5 things installed such that they block the hard drive coming out. And then there are drive mounts that don’t fit, and cables that don’t reach. It is not as easy as picking up a screwdriver without springing a leak.
I think it is a problem that you can’t really tell how messy something is going to be unless you’ve done it on exactly that piece of equipment a few times. Example - I have an LCD display I moved on Saturday from my Windows PC to my new iMac. But getting it off the PC (which used two monitors) became a vast fiasco. On the PC, which monitor was #1 and which was #2, and which was virtually to the right, kept spontaneously changing. I never found out how to keep their relative order stable. So, before I unplug this from the PC, I position the mouse pointer in the primary display, which was a CRT, and go into Display Properties and uncheck the Extend Display box. The mouse pointer jumps into the monitor I want to disconnect, where it can’t do anything. The other monitor now has all the things I can click, and the mouse pointer can’t travel into it, so now I have to try to recover the situation using no mouse. It’s this bizarre chicken-and-egg problem I probably messed with for half an hour. All the while it seems like something keeps randomly flipping the relative identities of the two.
No doubt some will disagree, but I’ve come to regard Windows PCs as something of a black art. Sometimes things work fine, but some things are hard enough to fix that we never fix them. My best example was the networked laser printer that was in the printer room two doors down the hall from my office at work. For some reason, the IT department could never make my PC print to it. They spent 5 years, on and off, working on it. They eventually got an itch about this thing, that it was ridiculous that they couldn’t make it work, because everybody else could print to it, and I could print to all the other printers. They made fixing it something of a grudge match. Out of roughly 500 PCs and maybe 30 printers in the building, why did this particular combination refuse to work? A couple of the IT guys who worked on it seemed, to me, quite bright, and they made several other things work that looked difficult to me. But for 5 years, I sent all my long text documents to the dye sub printer over in the next office wing, and had other people telling me that I should not be tying up this expensive color printer for plain text, while IT tried to make the obvious choice work. It never did. Eventually the printer got replaced, and the new one worked for me.
The issue is that the “standards” don’t always cover every contingency, so in the PC world there are always certain combinations of hardware that don’t work together even though they’re both in theory “standards compliant”. This isn’t a problem on Macs or with PCs from a major manufacturer (and part of the premium you pay for Dells or whatever goes towards that sort of compliance testing).
I have seen issues exactly like you describe occurring with the software on Macs. Case in point, my prodigal iMac here that has synced with the Active Directory server exactly twice and refuses to log anything differently on the far more common occasion of it claiming to be synced up but not actually verifying anything via AD.
No, the OLD (9.x and earlier) just works. OSX suX. BTW, so do all versions of Winblows, except for NT 3.x & 4.x. 2000 PRO is the one I use, because they didn’t destroy NT too bad going from NT4 to 2000 (NT5), but XP (NT5.1) on is utter crap, so 2000 PRO is the only one that can do modern things, but is still somewhere in the ballpark of working halfway decent like NT4 did. Once APPLE killed off the original system in favor of OSX, there have been NO operating systems that “Just Work”. All of 'em need a “guru” to set them up for the “technopeasants”. Too bad OS9.x is too old to do modern stuff with. Otherwise, I’d set up all my technopeasants with it.
Oh god, 2000 Pro. I HATED 2000 Pro because its directX support was so flamingly inconsistent. It was like the Senor Cardgage of operating systems–almost one thing and not quite another.
Just goes to show. Every OS sucks.