Grindingly Slow Laptop!

Been using MSE since W7 was in RC with NO problems, and have now removed AVG from laptop (XP)and replaced with MSE too. Again NO problems !

To have 2 or more AV or SPAM apps installed at the same time, is to invite trouble
.

That's very clever of it.

Are you quite sure?

Is it possible that the un-installation was not complete?

G

Different Anti Virus systems on the same computer will fight each other.

Therefore - only one AV at a time on the machine.

And if installing a new AV, make sure the old AV is uninstalled first!

Removing AV and Firewall software completely can be a nightmare, some won't even uninstall. Zonealarm used to be one of the worst even though the earlier versions before it became a system hog were quite good.

I still look at MS stuff with "If MS ever make a Vacuum Cleaner it will be the only thing they have ever made that doesn't suck" in the back of my mind

---and that would be why about nine tenths of the world uses it.

Bit of a paradox eh?

Actually, Excel is an excellent prog.

Word is appalling

Access is dreadful

Et cetera.

G

Word is an abomination. How many hours have I spent trying to outfox it's stupid formatting glitches. I have been on the verge of crying.

I've not used Excel for years, but, I used to find it very annoying that it couldn't work out Deg. Min. Sec. from Decimal Degrees or the similar Hr. Min. Secs

Lots of people use these and a simple trig. calculator can do it, so why don't spreadsheets? They don't even handle degrees you have to convert to radians first?

I eventually finishd up with the following for the Seconds Col. (not sure if it's right or not)
@INT(60*((60*(N8-@INT(N))-@INT(60*(N8-@INT(N))))

Something in PC Mag about it, but you shouldn't have to do all this

I never use Word either, probably still buggy after all these years. It used to really annoy me that you couldn't Highlight a word with the mouse and then choose Search & Replace.... it was broken Even the early versions of DOS Edit could do that, so could Wordpad but not Word. Just imagine someone having to change a lot of Part No's in a Manual

They partly fixed it in (I think) 2003, but it still didn't work if there was a space or it was two words.

I have to go back to NT5 for the last decent FileManager Winfile
(Still works with XP and W7)

Having no control over what is selected with the mouse when I click on a line is annoying as is the Caps Lock staying on, you would think they would at least make it beep

No paradox at all. Most of the world does not have a choice - Microsoft marketing have seen to that

Once you get used to Excel, I totally agree with George. Way back in 1995, I wrote an expert system in Excel (and a colleague called Richard Scaife did the macros to provide the front end). It was a very simple way of modelling the output from an expert making a decision.
I use Excel to keep track of the household expenditure, and I know someone who uses Excel to record a mass of genealogy data so that she can track a family across successive censuses.
I have done a lot of writing in Word. When it's a 50+ page report, and you have to use a specific macro, and you end up spending more time cursing than writing, you realise that Word is a POS compared to any recent version of Word Perfect. Note here that a lot of the US legal system still uses WP. A 15 page conference paper is OK in Word when it is specified that you can use your own format - but have to submit a Word .doc.
George, you did not mention Powerpoint. Again, if you don't have a choice, it is not too bad (it's just that Lotus Freelance did things better about 20 years back). But I still use it for things like CD labels, Passport and similar photos, and sending pictures to people who do not have a good image editing program, but do have Micro$oft Office.
Its a bit like "Horses for Courses" - only you are told which horse to ride.
Just imagine if the weekly competition rules said that you could only submit pictures originally taken with a K5 and an 18-55 kit lens. Even worse, imagine if every competition, everywhere in the world, specified that you must use a Leica ... (and any editing must use Gimp under Linux)
Geoff

Algy,

It would be impossible to provide a built-in function for everything. As you have found, by putting a few brain-cells to work, you can achieve your objective. That is Excel's strength.

G.

I was being ironic. The salesman's job is a lot easier when your operating system is the only one with a GUI. All other computers would have a monochrome monitor and a command line control (or maybe menu), strictly the domain of Boffs and Geeks. Not to say that no-one else would get around to it, but they got their first.

You criticise others for "woolly thinking" then you make a generalisation like that? Copy book well and truly blotted. I assume you mean you like/dislike them.

George,

Microsoft's Access is far from dreadful if one understands how to get the best from it. I do, and I can tell you that it has earned me quite a lot of money since I first started using the original version, and rapidly upgraded to version 2, in 1991.

My first application which I wrote for a department of the NHS, ran on a 386 PC. It replaced a Motorola based Unix system running an Informix database. On the Unix system, the weekly reporting application that produced the data required to be produced by this particular department was started on a Friday afternoon and didn't finish until around midday on Monday. If the system stopped for whatever reason, that weeks figures were lost because there was no time left during the weekdays to run the application.

My solution, written first in Access 1 and replaced using Access 2, did the same job in 3 hours.

How much that says about the capabilities of the Unix system v the PC, or Informix v Access, I'm not sure.

So, I'll not have any Access bashing around here. It's a superb system, but needs some understanding and more than a smattering of Visual Basic knowledge to get the best from it.

PS: Although the last upgrade I did to that application was from Access 2000 to XP (2003), it is still producing usable information almost 20 years from it's inception. Now that has to be some kind of record, doesn't it?

PPS: I don't use Access any more because I'm now retired . . . and it does my head in.

Visicalc was the first spreadsheet. Lotus 123 and Excel were copies

back in the day: Says more about the Informix programmers and DBA! Lots of experience here informix under UNIX/Dynix and it beat the pants off any desktop app for business processing. Of course, like any system, if you don't design the database right, get the indexing right, get the DB engine config and tuning right and then have analysts/programmers with borderline personality disorders designing your apps, you might struggle to beat a PC running access. I know of a programmer who to get an accurate progress bar for the person running the report, did the processing once to get the total numbers and then processed again this time showing a neat progress bar. Doh! Poor end users.

I think I've got a full set of 3.5" disks for Supercalc here somewhere, although I've never used it. I rescued them from being chucked during a recent clear-out as I firmly believe old hardware/software needs to be kept for historical reasons. That's why I have two BBC Bs, a 386, and a couple of 486s around.