Grindingly Slow Laptop!

With respect, it was the first spreadsheet on a personal computer, or "micro", as they were known then.

You presumably never used TabAPL.

G

Generalisations are not necessarily evidence of woolly thinking.

Excel is respected by all who know how to use it. Word on the other hand is generally despised. It was inferior to Wordperfect and to Amipro, but succeeded because Microsoft bundled it with Excel to form the first version of Office.

After a dozen or more versions, the paragraph formatting still doesn't work properly, and changing styles is much more cumbersome than it might be.

I understand many legal firms still use Wordperfect. I'd still use Amipro if I had a copy.

As for Access, it is a one-file DB that only works well with one user. Totally unscaleable. It should have been abandoned years ago.

It's great for applications like a holiday planner for teams of 5 or fewer people.

G

I have just looked up TabAPL on de Internet. No mention.

In a thousand years time, people will worship Tim Berners-Lee. He created the WWW in seven days, and history was born.

G

Proves my point about Micro$oft marketing.
They were, at least, third with a decent GUI. Digital Research had GEM - which was faster than Win 3, only several years earlier, and Apple had their own. The Acorn Archimedes had a funny mix of command line and GUI - and probably the easiest Basic to program for graphic images.
The contemporary Windows 1 and 2 were kludgy and sooooooo slow. If Tim Berners-Lee had developed the HTTP protocol for GEM, DR would probably be ruling the computer world by now. And, of course, there were several GUIs in use on mainframes and mini-computers - but these were often specific to the application; in the late '80s and early '90s, the front end interfaces to most military simulation systems were graphical.
What Micro$oft had done was corner the market on operating systems for the IBM (and clone) micro-computers. A bit like saying that you can have any soft drink that you like - but we control the water supply. Imagine photography between the wars, if one firm had total control of the 35mm filmstock market - and could say which cameras were permitted to use it.
Geoff

Trial running Ubuntu (running it from the CD) on my desktop PC... looks promising. It works well so I think it's going to go on the laptop soon! Strangely the fonts are different on Pentaxuser.... Times New Roman I think, and basic text in the comment box!

Linux uses different fonts that are not necessarily part of the standard recital of fallback options used by web designers. Many sites do have alternatives and this shouldn’t be a problem,

One tip if you decide to go ahead and install Ubuntu on the laptop; google for and run “Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder” and make a note of your Vista license key somewhere (there may be two); you never know when a spare license can come in handy.

After you install Ubuntu, go to Ubuntu Software Center (or Synaptic Package Manager) and select and install 'Ubuntu Restricted Extras' which will install mp3, avi. mpeg, TrueType, Jave, Flash, Codecs, etc. All things which cannot be distributed for free (as in freedom not beer) due to licenses.

Then your browser fonts should look as good if not better than on Windows.

Note you might gain further display improvement - mostly speed from hardware assist - with restricted drivers for your graphics card: if applicable for your particular graphics card you'll see an icon for Restricted Drivers on upper right panel.

You can also go for completely free and go for Debian, the new version went out lat month and most of the time it's more stable then Ubuntu.

Ok after five pages, this thread is still going strong...
It needs to be said.....

hit the power button...
if at any point during the start up you happen to see anything resembling this:


then your computer is obviously infected with some form of the dreaded windoze virus.
Throw it out and buy a mac.
Problem solved.

Not everyone can go out and dump wads of cash at the shrines of Steve Jobs. If I could I'd probable get a MacBook Air.

I say go Ubuntu!

buy cheap you buy twice... the people who cannot afford a stable solid workhorse of a computer, are probably the ones that can least afford to drop several hundred dollars on an unusable, unstable, prone to premature failure desk brick. Sometimes it pays to save a little longer and buy quality.
I've got 4 macs, the oldest of which is an emac g4 800 with one gig of ram running tiger that can still run photoshop and run circles around the computer the OP mentioned in the first post in this thread...

You can't really say that given that Apple fell prey to the nVidia substrate fiasco with some of their GPUs.

To cut a long story short nVidia engineers used the wrong kind of substrate to attach the actual chip to the chip housing. As they heated up and cooled they slowly became disconnected from within as the two chosen materials did not expand and contract at the same rate.

This was right up to the 9400 series GPUs! They have a rather high failure rate and a short warranty period.

Same components affecting PCs and Macs.

The biggest difference is hardware standardisation that means stability because you don't need 10000000000000+ different drivers. That is the real boon of a Mac. but if you build your own PC you can get it just right.

I still want to get a Mac though. Need a portable work machine.

Ok Apple can get bit with problems from suppliers. Apple computers are not perfect.
between 2 mac desktops and two mac laptops, an iphone and apple tv, an airport express, and an airport extreme, I can honestly say I've only had one problem (bad capacitors in an imac g5) that needed a repair, and apple replaced the logic board free of charge even though it was two years out of warranty, no viruses ever, and no lost income due to computer down time in ten years of running all macs.

prior to going Mac, I had a laptop with windoze me for six months which spent more time broken than running, and cost me several big clients due to failing to meet deadlines when the computer crashed,... NEVER AGAIN will I buy anything that relies on anything from Microsoft.
They only way I'd ever give money to microsoft is if I was offerd the chance to pay a reasonable fee for the opportunity to kick Bill Gates in the nutz.

I have to say I've had a good experience with my Airport Extreme and Express. Sadly retired now as we are not in a cable area. The wife loves her iPhone and had an iPod previously. I just think some of their pricing is a bit off. Not so bad over the pond but 1:1 currency conversion from USD to GBP is silly, same as with Adobe.

Everything in a Mac these days also rely on Windows because it's the same hardware found in every other PC so it's a bit hard to say that everything with Microsoft on it is bad....
Apple also out source their production.
I know that ASUS made the normal Macbooks several years ago i've no idea who made them now and the processors in the iPhone 4 and iPads are made by Samsung.
So basically Apple is like HP and DELL but the only difference and the biggest difference is that they make the operation system as well.

I'm really not sure what's better....
Does apple make the drivers themselves or not for the hardware?
If they do i believe that Mac are more stable but windows would have drivers that are more specialized and be able to pull more power out of the hardware.


i wonder how Chrome will do....