Micro soft bl**s it again
 

How can MS stay in business w/ it's cra**y error prone software and upgrades.

A few months ago I upgraded my perfectly good and stable ie7 for the much touted new and improved ie8, umpteen crashes and freezes later ie8 is no more and there will be a purge/boycott of MS products and so called upgrades from now on.

Whats up w/ these guys? Between them And VAG I'm losing all faith in any manufacturer's willingness/abilty to provide a quality product and to stand behing their work

I am soooo pissed

Bill,

Only way they stay in business is that they demand that new computers come with the "latest and greatest" version of their crappy software installed.

Personally until the first service pack comes out I will not even look at the newest OS. Played with Vista for 20 minutes then formatted my last laptop. Gonna wait on V7 for a while as well.

Its the holidays and people buy new computers, thats why V7 is out right now, not because its better or we need it, its to sell more product.

Go with Firefox for a browser. I never use IE unless its something that will not work otherwise.

I need a new laptop and was specifically waiting for Win 7 release.....Now, the one I'm looking at comes with "Windows 7 Starter".......Did my research and "Starter" only lets you have 3 applications open at one time.

Just a dirty trick to get money out of you up front and then spring for an upgrade later....So, they just lost another sale.........

Interesting tidbit.

Have a bunch of sites of varying product and target demographic.

Have been seeing IE's market share steadily dropping for a couple of years now.

My sites that cater to 17-25 yr old males see IE representing 50% or less of browsers.

Sites that see an older typically female audience are higher. Used to be close to the market share of Windows but now down to around 65% +-.

Firefox is taking big chunks out of IE, Safari in 3rd. Safari number is IMO not accurate as it sometimes gets detected as a Mozzila product and incorrectly registered as Fireofx

People are wising up.

I've been using Chrome on my Vista(another cob job from MS) laptop, so that's what I just installed on the desk. Only thing I miss is that Chrome doesn't have a Google tool bar which I do miss because of the translate and spell check buttons. Can you believe that the Google browser doesn't have the features that Google gives to MS and FF?

If i miss it too much I'll try FF

secret is to just not use IE unless you absolutely have to. I use Firefox (and Netscape before that) as much as possible which is 99.97% of the time.

I've never really had any problems with it, I just run IE8 (with no dumb plugins) on my office and home PCs and don't have FF or anything else even loaded.

gave up IE over a year ago. Firefox isnt perfect but it is much better. also for what its worth Apple seems just as bad, everytime I start Itunes there seems to be a new version that I have to download.

I never used the translate and spell check buttons in the google toolbar, but with chrome you can just enter a search instead of a url. For example, instead of typing in pelicanparts.com type in porsche 911 parts.

You can also type "translate blah blah blah" into the url/search field and a google translation will come up. I just tried it with a headline from a French newspaper and it worked perfectly.

As for spell check, chrome underlines in red any typos in any field you're typing in, just like firefox or MS Word.

I can't think of a reason in the world to use IE as one's main browser anymore. I do still keep it installed for certain sites that seem to only work on it (or anything from microsoft.com).

Google toolbar translate is much more powerful than what you guys describe

If you go to say a German website, just hit the translate button and the entire site goes to english, very nifty

I'm a fanboy but I hear ya on that one. Enough already.

FF is so far beyond IE its not funny. The plug ins make are a total game changer.

I run ad blocker and autopager.

I NEVER see ads on web pages and it auto downloads pages for me so I don't have to keep hitting the next button.

When I go to a website on IE and I see all of the ads I am blown away. I am shocked at how much pleasant it is in an ad free world.

I am on FF 3,6 beta right now. Going great.

I use Opera. It's the fastest browser around by a wide margin.

go to FF Bill

I did it years ago and have been happy ever since

or you can pay 85% more and buy a Mac

PS - if you are doing data acq. or other non-business, non-consumer type stuff, then the Mac will have problems too

I went to a Lexus dealer but they would not sell me a car for the same price as the ones at the Hyundai dealer.

Base Apple Mac Pro 2.66 ghz Quad Core Xeon with 3 gb ram =$2,499

Dell Precision T7500 64 bit OS (OSX is 64 bit) starts at $1,440.

But wait, we need to customize to hit the same spec as the base Mac.
Bring processor up to 2.66 add $1,380
Bring ram up to 3GB add $95
Bring storage up to 500 GB, still short of the Macs 640 GB but ok, add $246
Upgrade disc drive to a 16X burner, not quite the 18X Mac Super Drive but ok, add $41.

We'll ignore the graphics card, the Dell comes stock with a 256 mb 2d card vs the 512 MB 3d card in the Mac. Don't have time to figure out which of Dells upgrades are equivalent but no matter as it's more money.

So the Dell is $3,642 minus $360 instant savings for a total of $3,282 making it %75 more expensive than the MacPro.

Let's try that again with the base model Vostro at $499, oh wait, you can't even get it with the Xeon processor so nevermind.

how fast will the Mac run my data logger, GIS & stats pgms?

it won't run some of them at all (nor will XP for that matter)

I've been a loyal Opera user since v6.

But it's no longer the fastest around. Chrome destroys it in nearly every test. It's on par with the others though. It's got is quirks. If Chrome had the features that Opera does, I'd probably switch over. But it's still pretty thin. I rely on far too many Opera personal configurations to switch.

not sure how poorly written code is an operating systems fault

IE8 ether works or doesn't. I get to trouble shoot this stuff for clients. Not much in between. Also many companies have not updated their software to work with it. Wells Fargo didn't work with it last time I checked. Their response use IE7. So not everyone was ready for it. Switch to Firefox, it works great. I like Opera even better but there are still a few sites that it doesn't like. Put Firefox on and install the Google toolbar and you will get the things you are looking for.

Running XP with AVG antivirus, Opera web browser. Happy camper.