Windows woes

Today was a damp day. Rachel, Jasmine and Clare went off to the St Fagan's Folk Museum. I went shopping for new office equipment, meeting up with Ashley in John Lewis', and returning home with a seventeen inch HP Windows 8 'laptop' to set up for use as a dedicated crime data work-station for the CBS office in the coming year.

Thus far I have been deterred by so many negative reviews from considering Windows 8, but now it's getting rarer to find Windows 7 kit on sale, there wasn't much alternative to spending lots of time and energy hunting for something to buy of the specification required before the end of our financial year. Ah well, sooner or later I have to find out more about this, and waste time re-learning how to use a piece of equipment to perform familiar tasks efficiently, just because a user interface has been changed without any reason that's at all relevant to my needs. But this is what commercial companies do to prove that we are their slaves, rather than them serving out best interests. 

I much prefer the superior Linux operating system with its choice of user interfaces, but in the everyday world of users who are just consumers of tools and products, persuading anyone to change their habits is as difficult for them as it is for me. So reluctantly I have a go a learning something new and pretty irrelevant to my working needs, as it's less inconvenient than chasing around after an alternative. 

If you're relatively new to computers, setting up a Windows 8 PC is elegantly simple. If you've spent decades getting Windows or Linux machines to work the way you want them to, it's painful. You feel as if you're not in control. The way the user interface works is different, it's more difficult to get beneath the slick looking surface to the level where there's detailed control. At first encounter, it feels as if you have no control at all. The user interface is designed with touchscreen in mind more than mouse. Touch is all very well, but  mouse control is more accurate in the hands of an experienced user. The chosen machine wasn't touch-screen, and I found this infuriating at first.

Setting up the machine for initial use took four time longer than doing a fresh Linux install, then even longer as I pressed on to upgrade the machine to Windows 8.1 straight away, since this fix promises to address some of the complaints made against Windows 8 from day one. All in all, we're talking five hours finding my way around and then machine minding installation and downloading patches and upgrades. This included half an hour going around in circles trying to find out how to do the upgrade, as links provided pointed to the Windows App store, and this had nothing to show how to get the upgrade. I got the upgrade from the Microsoft website, which was less than user friendly, taking to the bottom of a very long page before you could click on a download link that produced to goods. What a mess!

OK so TalkTalk internet is lousy and slow, but it only crashed the upgrade download once, and after a reboot, picked up where it left off, so that's one up for Microsoft. But, the process took up the whole of a Saturday evening, and at the end I still had to find out how to install my small portfolio of programs to turn into a piece of kit for the office desktop that 'just works'.

This is is me, performing a few of the functions of a system administrator (most are beyond me) to keep a small team of people active and confident that computers will do what they need, are secure, stable and don't make unintelligible demands of them that get in the way of productive work, or require them to change and re-learn working methods without hindering their work schedule. If the creative and visionary designers of a new generation of operating systems had understood the needs of the 'drones' at the real workfaces of the world, they would not have changed so much at the functional surface level, or at least made adoption of such a change optional. No wonder PC sales have slumped badly over the past year. Bad news travels fast.

 

A satisfying day

At the end of the morning I met my good friend Roy Thomas for a delicious sandwich and coffee at the Fat Pig Deli on Romilly Road. How marvellous that the weather was mild enough to sit outside to eat and and catch up on all the news of the past few months. Then I went into town to the CBS office to install the new desktop PC and transfer data. On my way I passed by St John's and saw two guys at work on the new glass doors. I couldn't resist stopping and taking another picture.

 

It'll look very stylish when complete. I sneaked inside to take a look at what had been done with the re-levelling of the floor, and re-location of the step the other side of the tower porch, and was very impressed. The Victorian tiles were taken up and re-laid, and new tiles in an exact match of colour and pattern were added into the excavated area where the former porch had been. I wish it could have been done while I was there, as a great deal of worry was attached to having a hazardous step at a main entrance to the church, but five years on, it's a pleasure to see a job so beautifully done. Kudos to Peter Bricknell and his team of conservation minded builders.

Setting up the new HP desktop PC was delightfully easy, with only a brief internet hunt for a driver for the Dell lazer printer. It attached itself to the office network without any hassle, and then all I had to do was transfer data and settings. I have to confess that although I have set up dozens of computers for use over the past twenty five years, I've always preferred to do so 'by hand' - copying selected data, making the odd adjustment to file structures to suit new circumstances, installing printers and configuring email programs and getting them to recognise their legacy data, and generally that meant a day of machine minding. This time I thought I'd try the file transfer wizard.

I took my double ended USB cable for this task, but couldn't find the disk with the drivers on it, although I know they are on the hard drive of one of my machines. I couldn't be bothered to hunt, and trusted that Windows 7 plus internet would find the necessary files. No such luck. Rather than waste time, I thought I would try the transfer option using the office network. It was straightforward, although not clear quite enough to avoid a few minutes of confusion getting the computers to handshake across the network. It did work however, taking the best part of an hour to move data and settings to the new machine. All in all, setup along with downloading and installing Libre Office, took two and a half hours, letting me out of the office in time to get home, grab my shoes and go back out for my weekly Chi Gung workout. I love it when everything goes right.