Oolite Bulletins

I´m so sick and tired of PC hardware and software companies making using a PC,a daily head ache.. where be it hardware durability, software reliability, or even documentation being so limited, that you have to do a lot of educated guessing...

My story is a story of about 15 years of continuous PC use... I can sum my problems up here

in the 90´s I bought my first PC an Intel PC with 133 MHz CPU, and 16 MB of ram on a VIA tech motherboard...

After 8 months of use, the motherboard´s keyboard DIN port died... in those days, there where no USB or PS2 connections, so that was bad... It did not work in DOS, but worked in windows...
you used DOS a lot back then to play certain games, so naturally the keyboard wouldn't work in
DOS based games

I tried reloading the BIOS, by running a bat file, that was activated via the autoconfig.bat file, but that resulted in that the PC blocking me at startup, because default behavior was.. when no keyboard detected.. hold PC until user presses F1...

Now how the Frick should I press F1 when the keyboard did not work in BIOS or Dos mode...
that picture you find at www.boreme.com, proves me, that i´m not the only one who have experienced that.

The Warranty covered it however, so I got a new motherboard... however after 4 months of normal use, the PC died completely... again the warranty covered it, but in both scenarios I had the PC in for repair for 1½ month., 3 months in all... 6 months after that.. I died again.. now outside warranty... because it was only extended the 3 moths I had it in for repair.. Or at least so they told me.. little did I know, that I had a full year of extra warranty, when they replaced something like the motherboard.. They cheated me there... no wonder they closed later...

What triggered this rage of mine, is that just right now, my mouse went depleted of battery, I switched it to the one I thought that was reloaded, but as it turned out... nope, that battery was also depleted. I remembered, that I had to just press the battery a little bit, after inserting it into the reloader. Or else the reload process did not start.. as indicated by a green diode. And it takes 8 hours to reload, since it is on an USB port...

This is a Logitech G7 Gaming mouse, not entirely cheap, and maybe I wouldn't have been so angry about, if where it not for...

Hewlett Packard Pavilion DV9000 laptop...

Windows SP3 for XP made it real bad... wireless connections are not available after SP3. So I had to restore it to a date in July. however.. now wireless connections are only available after a cold start.. A warm restart, again makes wireless connections unavailable.

It also Overheats.. this is a factory default version with 1.84 GHZ, Intel Duo CPU and a Go7600 graphic card... however Sims 2 can overheat it.... and it shuts down with no warning, which of course makes my better half very angry...

To top it all, the power cable is faulty, so you have to be very careful when plugging it in, again the warranty covers it all.. but again, it all takes time...

OpenGL and HIS Graphic Cards...

The default ATI OpenGL Vista Drivers simply don't work on these cards... support takes months to reply, and when they do, it is a half arsed “did the latest drivers work for you”...

Bulk Educated People* are working for them I presume...

But to get on with my list.... My current PC overheats, if I put the sides on, even though it has a 850 watt power supply... so the there is more than enough power... extra fans don't help... etc (they need more power, so they only add up to the problems...

I even once experienced a power supply nearly exploding, in an AMD 233 MHZ I had once... nearly factory new... again covered by warranty, I was nearly suing the company that made these power supplies cause there was flames involved... imagine if I had left the PC on to render something, and gone to sleep... Disturbing...

More software stupidness...

My Logitech mouse software is currently popping up like crazy to tell me that the battery is depleted... humorous..

Spell-checking software...

My setting is, English-USA-American..
Yet color is indicated as being wrong.. however I know it is a legit way to spell it in the USA

lets move on to other pieces of hardware non PC related...

My Sony Ericsson Cellphone died a couple of months ago.. software corruption... goodbye to all my custom settings after they “updated” the software to make it work again... Especially annoying is that all the words I added in the previous 1½ year into the SMS spell-checking dictionary was erased... why on earth aren't these kept separate from the phone software, it is a simple database, all my contacts, that was not saved on the SIM card, vanished... and I couldn't do much about it, other than noting... save on SIM card and phone memory Always, default settings is save in phone memory only bravo.... nice thinking there...

Back to PC related...

Cables in monitors... why on earth are some of these attached inside the monitor, if the cable dies on you, you have to open the casing to attach a new one... a corrupt cable is usually indicated by the screen being unable to show the correct colors... for example if the green color line is corrupt, it is impossible to show yellow or green or any color that requires green to show...

Right now I can not come up with all the incompatibility issues I have had over the years... but they have been plenty...

Lacking documentation...

Google is your friend, or rather used to be...
the top answers you get from Google these days are either

BUY this BUY that BUY something , just use your credit card PLEASE:::::::
and sometimes when you actually discover something you might order..
sorry, we only send inside the US. Wonderful, because i´m from Denmark.. you could have told me when I entered your website, cause you know my IP, therefore you also know my country...
but lazy web programmers, is in the bundle...

But Google is more and more becoming bad... may not be their fault.. but i´m finding it increasing difficult to get the information I seek.... and i´m repeatedly now checking old search engines... like altavista and yahoo...

When you actually find documentation, it is rarely complete... you have to use a lot of educated guessing in order to actually understand, what the documentation is trying to explain....

Often it tells you the obvious, and omits the important things.. so you have to do a lot of cross searching and checking, in order to get complete understandable documentation..

Regarding documentation, I also sometimes find it very annoying that 1000´s of people have posted the same kind of documentation. There should be some sort of self recognition, of hey that dude did explain this so well, that I do not need to make a half arsed attempt of doing so, and drowning his very helpful documentation... 120 hits down the search engine list...

Well... I better stop now... rage over

I have an answer to your problem: get a mac. Real simple, but expensive.

Don't Panic; FSOneblin

Linux. Solves half the problems of the world. The rest could be solved with a more robust economic system.




Now that macs use intel chipsets I think they'll slowly become as crap as PC hardware...

Oh boy, am I glad to use mac after reading Your post.

Side note: I have a web shop, selling PCs and Macs. Usually 2-3 a day and vast majority sold being PCs: Acer, HP-Compaq, Toshiba, Dell and IBM. So far I'm very happy with the quality of this brands as I had maybe 4-5 faulty units in more than one year, evenly spread over these brands. And one iMac had DVD drive DOA.

One thing I noticed is that brand name doesn't guarantee quality anymore. Everything is produced massively and cheap (and in China). Logitech is one example, Samsung is the other that pops into my mind with product range from very poor to excellent even in the same price range.

So, try&buy, or buy&pray.

My own (cheap) answer would of course also be "get yourself a Mac", but one has to admit as well, that these are not perfect, either.

While my previous Mac (first generation iBook) worked perfectly for almost seven years without any glitch (no, not true; I had to replace the power cord, because it broke just behind the plug on the computer's side; and of course the battery did not make it for seven years), and is still fully functional, with its only problems being ugly scratches in the casing and that it can't run Oolite, its predecessor, a PowerBook 150, died of harddisk-failure after only three years or so.

My current first generation MacBook Pro had its problems, too. I had to replace the inverter board, because the screen went black (after the warranty expired, of course...), and have a similar problem with the power cord, which slips out of its protective shell where it enters the plug, making computing a somewhat sizzling experience, if I don't wrap protective tape around the plug.

But still, compared to the issues my wife uses to have with her Windows laptops, I am quite fine with it.

In my experience, quality has seriously gone downhill - you get -way- more bang for your buck, but unless you really go out and source your own components (and even then it's not guaranteed) most of that bang for buck is made with the cheapest possible components which the manufacturers could source. I've certainly had more hardware-related failures this decade than last.

The other thing is that the machines are -way- more complicated these days and everything runs much closer to limits, so far less tolerant of limiting situations (temperature, power spikes, etc).

As for software, there's little excuse why it's still as rubbish as it is. The easy way out is to blame Microsoft (I do, often and vocally), but in general Software Engineering still isn't in the public sector.


The "Press F1 to continue" on keyboard failures actually per design, and not just a silly error message. The idea behind it was that it really is the keyboard that's dead and you're supposed to plug a new one in.
Unlike the "An unexpected error has occurred: Unknown Error. Continue Yes/No?", variants of which are all too common and purely down to lazy developers.

I can completely sympathise, Frame. I wrestled with MS operating systems from 1991 (TBH, there wasn't much to go wrong with DOS 3.3, apart from being infected with 'Brain' or 'Den Zuk') right up to 2004.

In the spring of 2004 my PC was grinding to a crawl, so I did the usual ritual of formatting the HDD and re-installing Windows. At the end of the install, Windows reported that it couldn't detect my USRobotics external modem (hardly an obscure piece of equipment). I tried to help Windows by directing it to COM1. But apparently, Windows couldn't detect my serial port.

I got in the car and bought an eMac.

Micha wrote:

The "Press F1 to continue" on keyboard failures actually per design, and not just a silly error message. The idea behind it was that it really is the keyboard that's dead and you're supposed to plug a new one in.
Unlike the "An unexpected error has occurred: Unknown Error. Continue Yes/No?", variants of which are all too common and purely down to lazy developers.

While when the keyboard port on the Mb dies... and only works in windows... then you are dead in the water... which was what happend to me...

I've not had all the problems you describe, but I did get fed up with Microsoft security 'features' and the sheer sluggishness of my PC once it was loaded up with anti-virus, firewalls, spyware checkers etc. I dumped windows in 2006 and switched to Ubuntu Linux, never looked back.

However, when my PC hardware finally dies, I will be going Mac.

Cheers,

Drew.

I was searching for some tutorials on OpenGL programming, more specific, it was shaders.... it prompted me to download all the tutorials in an exe file, whereby it would install the examples... at least so I thought...

It is called Game Tutorials2...

What it turned out to be was an add for buying the CD with the tutorials on... only 69$(kind of expensive since I do not know what I get)

I only discovered this when I clicked the specific tutorial in question...

The menu itself.. is pretty, but slow, to actually show the menu... something I dislike in particular
is when someone has to showoff his skills, at the expense of functionality..

That is exactly the case for this menu...

luckily there was a HTML link, so you could read the tutorials, online.

So when I first viewed the source files, and read the first comment lines.. that fills an entire screen to start with..

The author uses his knowledge to disrespect newcomers to the OpenGL scene.. and had I payed money for it.. I would have been quite mad...

this is the comment line
“Talk to me like i´m a 3 your old!” Programming lessons..

I don't know about you people. But if my business school math teacher had started out by saying. I think of you all as 3 year olds... so the education is going to reflect that..

I would feel pretty offended...

SO a hidden ADD + offending text...

not the best way to ensure

the mouth to mouth recommendation is in your favor...

This shows to typically arrogance you sometimes hit...

Basic lack of understanding how to communicate and deal your
product to a potential customer...

It might be non profit... but I cannot see it being non-profit
with a price tag of 70$.. I believe games here in Denmark cost
about the same...

Anyway, i´ll manage quite fine without these tutorials.. I was merely seeking
complementary code... ...

Potential Customer Lost...

Frame wrote:

“Talk to me like i´m a 3 your old!” Programming lessons..

Would you have preferred Programming Lessons for dummies (or whatever the Danish equivalent of this ever-expanding series of books and such is)?

Thargoid wrote:

Frame wrote:

“Talk to me like i´m a 3 your old!” Programming lessons..

Would you have preferred Programming Lessons for dummies (or whatever the Danish equivalent of this ever-expanding series of books and such is)?

Yeah... because while you are a novice, you are a dummy, but you are usually never a 3 year old.. , unless you are some wonder kid..

My five year old can programme in 'Turtle'...

Cheers,

Drew.

I'm glad I never touched a PC. The first computer I ever used was an apple+ in 1982. Although this type had a design flaw. You could reset it with a single key (not with tree keys down like today). The flaw was that this key was placed just above the <return> key. They had probably noticed the potential problems as the official apple manual advised to pop off that key from the keyboard with a screwdriver.

My first computer was a Mac plus . It was the only mac I had that got a hardware failure. After a year it sometimes spontaneously started to reset. My mac dealer said: "I know the problem and will fix it for you".

Half a year later the problem occurred again. This time I asked the man at work who maintained the macs. He said: "easy, just an adjustment of a voltage regulator" .
I found the regulator: it was turned to its maximum by the mac repairman. But I still had 3.5 volts at my mother board. Looking better I noticed a brown coloured contact through which the 5V was send to the mother board. It was just a bad connection and first repair had never solved the course of the voltage drop.

After that I bought me some tested macs (read second hand Mac SI and Mac SE30)

Than a performa, the first iBook model, (probably the same as McLane), and an iMac. With all those I never had hardware problems. I'm not counting replacement of a HD or upgrading the memory as failure.

As my last one now is 5.5 years old, I probably are overdue for a new one, which will certainly be a mac again.

You should think I was making this up.... but:

Today I got off the phone talking to Logitech...

My G7 mouse have got an annoying habit...

it´s left button double clicks, no matter what I do
the mouse is 2 years old, plus some months, so it is
not covered by the warranty anymore... but Logitech offers
factory warranty...

However, the supporter I got on the phone was Norwegian,as
some of you might know, I´m Dane... and the Norwegian was of course
talking Norwegian, while i´m talking Danish..

These two languages are similar, but the pronunciation is very different
the result was I could barely understand him, and the conversation took for longer than it should.. most of sorry, what.. say again..., could you just hold on, while telling him my address was hilarious.. no offense meant to any Norwegians of course...

I proposed English, but he was not to fond of that, or he didn't want to or understood my question..

While i´m calling a danish support line, I expect danish support...
Letter of complaint sent to their PR division.