It's been an uneventful and quiet few days, cool and overcast weather giving no incentive to venture far, except for re-painting the front railings and taking exercise. I walked to St Luke's to celebrate the Friday evening Mass, and was surprised that nobody arrived. What I hadn't realised was that I'd put the incorrect time in my diary, arriving half an hour after disappointed worshippers had went away. As I was painting the fence, Fr Mark arrived with the keys, but neither of us thought to check the time of the service with each other. I was quite upset with myself, as I'd finished painting, cleaned up in good time and could easily have left and arrived in good time.
I was doubly careful to arrive in good time to celebrate the Saturday morning Mass, for which four people turned up. Mary, our neighbour from opposite asked if I could take a look at her desktop PC, which was malfunctioning. It's an ancient Windows XP box, at least ten years old. An inspection revealed that the hardware is malfunctioning. It boots, and then reboots before reaching a full desktop making a tiny click sound which indicates a motherboard trip switch being triggered, probably due to the thermal sensor malfunctioning, or doing its proper job, or reacting to a motherboard voltage irregularity.
On odd occasions in the past, I've recovered a computer from this kind of failure by taking the back off and sucking out the accumulated dust, especially from the CPU and PSU fans. As the machine is so old, and given that Windows XP is no longer supported with security patches, it hardly seemed worth the effort. Reliability and stability is a crucial issue for older users. I hear enough complaints about Windows 10, because of the way frequent updates make for variability in time elapsed from stitch on to, say for example, starting work on an actual document in a word processor. Then there are all those notifications, nags and warnings which worry people who are unsure what the can and cannot ignore. It's daunting when you just want to do familiar things, and find all those so called 'helpful' digital admonitions are distracting enough to make you forget what you intended to do.
Mary is a light computer user, doing a little surfing, on-line flight booking and emailing, nothing more. A couple of years ago I gave her Kath's old Acer laptop, of a similar age to her desktop Dell. I set it up to run a lightweight version of Linux Mint as a backup device. It hasn't seen much use until now as it involved her getting used to a different kind of keyboard. No fun for a touch typist I guess. We set it up on her workstation, attached the Epson Stylus printer and powered it all up. It booted to the desktop and started Libre Office in less time that a Windows 10 machine with ten times the amount processing power. Moreover, the operating system made light work of finding the relevant printer driver and completing a test print successfully. About five minutes from switch on altogether.
On a Windows 10 machine this initial process might take half an hour, but not just due to boot time. The rapid expansion of the market for high street digital print-shops in recent years is an indication that occasional printing need is a deterrent to owning and managing a printer for many consumers of digital media. If you have a printer less than two or three years old, Windows 10 will find and download and install drivers automatically. For older devices, the process breaks down, search for the right download site has to be made by the user. The involves identifying the precise version and region of the world the hardware is destined to operate in. There can be thousands of options, so there's no simple straightforward solution to getting 'legacy' devices to work.
Some older devices never get driver upgrades and have to be scrapped. The cost of all this wastage, not to mention the toxic waste generated by computer redundancy, both to the economy and the environment, is unimaginable. New improved feature sets are always touted as beneficial, but for the majority of basic users, reliability and usability are what's most needed. These essentials have certainly improved over the past thirty years, but so has their complexity, making users ever more dependent on after-sales services provided by manufacturers.
Anyway, Mary is now set up properly with a computer and printer that's quite quick and reliable, doesn't suffer from viruses, or need unending updates to sabotage her workflow. Best of all, it cost both of us nothing to acquire, and me just a few hours of set up time, some years ago. I'm starting to think my remaining laptop running Windows 10 could benefit from the same treatment. The trouble is migrating data from two separate user areas, and learning how to do a clean install from a UEFI motherboard 64 bit device. I don't spend as much time as I used, to messing about with computers these days, let alone using them. For most purposes these days I use a tablet or a Chromebook, and just need transfer files to one Windows 10 device to print with my trusty HP lazer printer, which I know works with Linux as well. Is it worth the effort?
No comments:
Post a Comment