Computer dead

[geonuc]

Bitch:

I hate computers. Yeah, they are somewhat useful for basically everything but they suck when they don't work.

Home desktop froze up. After some diagnostics and further failures, I decided to give up on it and bought another one, a refurbished computer, just like the dead one. It didn't work either but at least I could take that one back for a refund. So now I'm thinking I'll take the dead one in to a computer repair place and see if they can resurrect the thing. That would save a lot of trouble and I wouldn't have to buy another Microsoft Office suite, anti-virus program, etc. I like the old computer. It's way more than I need in terms of speed and memory, and I have it set up the way I want.

Fortunately, I have two other computers I can use in the interim - a MacBook (which I'm typing on now) and a laptop from work. The laptop would be fine for personal use but my company sets up the laptops so you can't download any new programs without permission.

I hate computers.

[Sigma_Orionis]

The only thing that is more irritating than computers is elevators

[vendic]

And politicians.
If you are ever in an elevator with a politician and he's on his phone (a computer), feel free to scream like a banshee.

[SciFiFisher]

The analogy I like to use is this: Our current state of reliable technology when it comes to smart phones and computers is like jumping into your car every other week and driving about 50 feet before all 4 tires go flat. And if our cars actually broke down and proved as unreliable as that we would stop using them or force the auto industry to fix it. Strangely we do not do this with the smart phone or the computer industry.

[geonuc]

The analogy I like to use is this: Our current state of reliable technology when it comes to smart phones and computers is like jumping into your car every other week and driving about 50 feet before all 4 tires go flat. And if our cars actually broke down and proved as unreliable as that we would stop using them or force the auto industry to fix it. Strangely we do not do this with the smart phone or the computer industry.

It wasn't too long ago that I'd agree with that. But I think reliability has improved quite a bit. My dead computer, for example, has been trouble-free for years. I turn it on in the morning and after a minute, I'm happily ranting away on the internet.

I just hate them when they do break because I'm no longer technically competent to troubleshoot the damned things. That wasn't always the case. It's the same with cars. My vehicles are ridiculously reliable when compared to those of the past. They almost never cause trouble. But if I jump into my spiffy Subaru, press the start button and nothing happens? Beyond making sure the battery is not dead, there's probably not much I'll be able to do. That definitely wasn't the case before.

[geonuc]

By the way, I put this in BMR, but feel free to challenge me however you want. It's a bitch, not a rant.

[vendic]

Every time my computer updates I lose control of the brightness. It's a laptop so it's a pita.
Sometimes, it screws it up just rebooting.
Sometimes the volume stops working. Sometimes the start menu no longer functions.
I have a 3.2GHz quad core laptop with two graphic cards, the standard IBM and a Radeon 3D card, a 1Tbyte HDD, 8Gig of high speed RAM and it takes a good 5 minutes to boot before disk activity goes below 100%

When I first got into computers I had a 2MHz Z80 system, before most people really understood what a computer was. It booted in about 3 seconds.
Even if the full 8gig was used, to reload the entire RAM from a slow HDD at (100MB/s) would take 110 seconds. A little longer for the additional overhead of track seeking. Add a bit more for the graphics cards if they have separate RAM.
My PC uses typically under 2 Gig, often under 1 gig. That's about 20 seconds worth of transfer.
That's RAW HDD controller and DMA transfer bypassing the CPU. So the CPU is almost idle through this whole process.
So why does it take so long?
Depends on who you ask.
It could be Hardware (on reset/power up a startup sequence needs to be followed. If the hardware isn't setup to be able to save this information, it has to be rebuilt).
It could be firmware. I've seen programmers code some really shocking code for drivers because they aren't fluent in hardware but are programming it. If you are programming hardware you really need to understand the hardware well, not just enough to get by.
It could be the O/S because it has too many overheads. e.g. I notice on rebooting from hibernate that it does a virus check as it loads (at least it does on mine). Regardless of what you think of security, checking the state of a machine saved makes no sense. It's more likely to create problems than solve them.
Run a virtual machine (a software simulation of a computer on another computer) and you'll see how the virtual machine loads far faster than the main machine.
My tip, the O/S should run the computer O/S in a virtual machine. I know this is the latest in new tech for computers since it's been around since oh...1960 ish... but it would really sort a lot of problems out and allow a user to save the computer state at will.
But nooooo.... we'll be subjected to crap for longer and longer.

Sorry, just had to rant. Been there, done that and all

[geonuc]

The laptop I use from work boots in about ten seconds. It has a solid-state drive. Works pretty well.

[vendic]

I was going to go SSDD but it's worth as much as the laptop.

[grapes]

Yup, my other computer is a phone. If it stops, I can have it going again in ten seconds