More Adobe WTF
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@da Doctah said:
Congresss is full of snakes because it prevents them from going all stale and dried-out? Ok, if you say so!@Daniel Beardsmore said:
@DaveK said:
I do: Prosumer is to consumer, as progresss is to Congresss.
Congresss — full of snakes for some reason.
Congress(s) is full of snakes for much the same reason that a breadbox is full of bread.
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@DaveK said:
@da Doctah said:
Congresss is full of snakes because it prevents them from going all stale and dried-out?@Daniel Beardsmore said:
@DaveK said:
I do: Prosumer is to consumer, as progresss is to Congresss.
Congresss — full of snakes for some reason.
Congress(s) is full of snakes for much the same reason that a breadbox is full of bread.
That is very accurate (whether you realize it or not)
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@zzo38 said:
GNU GhostScript is another program to run PostScript files.
Don't get me started on GhostScript. We use it for some automated processes. Functionally, it works. It is, however, dogfucker slow, side effects if you run multiple processes in RAM at once (meaning each service host gets to process precisely ONE PDF at a time, slowly, without any multithreading) sucks ass at color (to the point that our default response is "GhostScript cannot do color") and the implementation of some features don't match the behavior of any known physical hardware, and occasionally just gives up midway through a file without error. As such, our GhostScript service looks a bit like this:0) Precalcualte expected number of pages. In many cases, this is EXTREMELY difficult.
1) Grab a document out of the FIFO queue
2) Process that document
3) Use another library to count the number of pages in the resultant PDF.
4) If they don't, goto 2.
5) Goto 1.One 17000 PDF run can take a week or more. Putting those same 17000 postscript files to paper takes a couple of hours if the print crew is being leisurely about it and they use one of the slow printers.
GhostScript is so bad we've considered wrapping Distiller in a service, but haven't gotten so far as reading the EULA to see if that's cool or not.
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@dhromed said:
Word drops cleartype for anything above a certain size, in favour of shitty greyscale semi-hinted antialias. AAAAAAAAAAAH.
More properly stated, Word drops shitty color-fringed ClearType for anything above a certain size, in favor of crisp, clean greyscale antialiasing.
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@Zylon said:
More properly stated, Word drops shitty color-fringed ClearType for anything above a certain size, in favor of crisp, clean greyscale antialiasing.
Put simply, when it comes to text, there is no conceivable way to trick the population of Planet Earth that a 100 DPI display is a 300 DPI display or higher, and looking at the grief involved with IBM's high resolution displays, 300 DPI desktop displays are some way off yet.
Greyscale antialising gives you fuzzy text. Sub-pixel antialising introduces colour fringing. Technically it shouldn't, because a perfect RGB subpixel grid should be able to draw a vertical black line by switching off a block of RGB, GBR, or BRG subpixels. However, if you go into Paint and test this (draw a column of adjacent yellow and blue pixels, and a column of adjacent red and cyan pixels), it doesn't work: you get dreadful fringing. Sub-pixel anti-aliasing is some sort of black art that both should, and shouldn't work at the same time.
My beef with Vista and 7 is that Microsoft STILL FAILED to apply greyscale antialiasing in the y axis, meaning that especially larger type will have visible aliasing on horizontal curves where ClearType can't have any effect by definition. (Also, you need to reverse the axes when rotating the panel.) Linux implementations achieve this perfectly; Mac OS X antialiasing also does this I think, although Mac text always comes across as gritty to me, not sure why.
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And here we yet again prove that everone has different perceptions of the same screen, and the same text rendering process.
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@Zylon said:
More properly stated, Word drops shitty color-fringed ClearType for anything above a certain size, in favor of crisp, clean greyscale antialiasing.
Don't sell that shit around here. Subpixel AA has higher resolution than plain greyscale AA. Cleartype is decidedly sharper/crisper than greyscale. If Cleartype is shitty for you, then CONFIGURE IT.
This notwithstanding the limitation of Vista-and-lower Cleartype that only works on the x-axis and does fuck-all for the y-axis, and that is the reason that old-Cleartype looks so bad for large type.
Of course, the most crisp/sharp is no AA at all, but I still personally prefer cleartype.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Technically it shouldn't, because a perfect RGB subpixel grid should be able to draw a vertical black line by switching off a block of RGB, GBR, or BRG subpixels. However, if you go into Paint and test this (draw a column of adjacent yellow and blue pixels, and a column of adjacent red and cyan pixels), it doesn't work: you get dreadful fringing.
Works perfectly on a black background, increasingly less on a brighter background; doesn't work at all on a white background. The choice of colour combinations strongly affects effectiveness and fringing.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
My beef with Vista and 7 is that Microsoft STILL FAILED to apply greyscale antialiasing in the y axis
?
I saw demonstration screenshots where 7 clearly has AA on the y-axis. It was a major point in the Win7 demo. The Cleartype version of Vista and 7 is not the same. Can you provide a screenshot where 7 shows the offending aliasing?
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Also, you need to reverse the axes when rotating the panel.
Funnily, it's just fine here. More of that black art voodoo. But screenshots of mine look pink on everybody else's. :)
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@dhromed said:
I saw demonstration screenshots where 7 clearly has AA on the y-axis. It was a major point in the Win7 demo. The Cleartype version of Vista and 7 is not the same. Can you provide a screenshot where 7 shows the offending aliasing?
I read that this was fixed in 7. I've also read that it was only fixed in WPF. My personal experience is that it doesn't work – I'm looking at a Windows 7 SP1 machine right now and it clearly doesn't anti-alias in the y axis, which has always been my experience. It looks identical to XP.
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Screenshots or bust. :)
Edit.
I have to add that I haven't had proper experience with Win7 so far, so I can't show that 7 does have vertical AA, if it has.
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Here:
Notice that ClearType renders 9 pt and 10 pt Calibri exactly the same size, which is absolutely absurd given that, in the x axis, the screen is effectively 300 DPI.
The comprehensive Texts Rasterization Exposures article from the Anti-Grain Geometry project has some examples of how to do it properly, including horizontal character positioning to 1⁄10 pixel with only subtle blur at some positions. He also addresses in depth the problem seen above where font sizes don't render correctly.
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And there you have it.
Nothing changes. :(
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@blakeyrat said:
Fuck HP.
I bought one of those, while working on developing touchscreen software, it had a flaky HD that eventually got replaced by Fry's (where I bought it), the video adapter on a media laptop couldn't decode 720p video in realtime, but the crowning 'jewel' that cemented my dislike for HP was the fact that it couldn't even keep up 2 FPS on th copy of Bejweled that came on it... at that point I gave up.
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@dhromed said:
And there you have it.
Nothing changes. :(
Did you look at that article I linked? The examples right at the beginning are incredible. I see no evidence that ClearType changed at all between XP and Windows 7, but this guy has implemented something that looks flawless. Far more accurate letter forms, much reduced fringing, smoothing in both axes, and even overlaps in the sub-pixel anti-aliasing. I reproduced his first example (tiny Arial text, around 6.5 pt) in Wordpad in XP and I got jagged, mis-spaced characters with visible red fringing. Zooming in shows that his sub-pixel colours are much more muted, which gives a more accurate representation.
I guess the problem for Microsoft in part is that their APIs are based on integral co-ordinates. RISC OS had sub-pixel positioning—fractional letter co-ordinates—back in 1992 or earlier (the OS rendered the anti-aliasing in its own splash screen on the fly, according to your anti-aliasing settings), followed by Mac OS in the late 90s. The Mac OS 9 font renderer, like Windows, assumed integral co-ordinates for characters, but the ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging) worked in fractional co-ordinates, and this gave many Carbon applications really badly spaced letters under Mac OS 8.5 through 9. I presume Mac OS X is all fractional co-ordinates now, but the font renderer gives a very gritty look to text that I've never liked. There's none of that in the Anti-Grain examples, so I have no idea what Apple are doing wrong. Someone needs to buy out this guy's codebase as it's unparalleled.
I suspect their bend-over-backwards-until-their-spine-snaps obsession with backwards compatibility is what's stopping Windows from having anything resembling a decent font renderer. Windows users expect dreadful old software written by morons to keep working forever, after all. WPF, as I've been led to believe, has the improved anti-aliasing, as there's no need for legacy support there.
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@blakeyrat said:
True that. There are some "acceptable" laptop keyboards, but no "great" ones.
Must disagree Blakey. Just bought an Alienware M14x and was truly surprised at they keyboard. It's about 175% the thickness of most laptop keyboards, and me, a notorious key-punching user, has yet to even make it twitch after 3 months or so using it. Nice solid feel to it as well.
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The next step is to miniaturize the hardware further so that it fits entirely in the front bit, so that you can implement a keyboard with pretty much full travel.
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@dhromed said:
The next step is to miniaturize the hardware further so that it fits entirely in the front bit, so that you can implement a keyboard with pretty much full travel.
(Typing this again as CS wasn't yet done dicking around with the page)
Depending on the OS, this is already possible. You can run Linux on mobile phones, and they're small enough to fit into the space under the palm rest.
I don't expect a full-travel keyboard in a laptop, but some Cherry ML low-profile tactile mechanical switches would be nice. What would be nice is a revival of the Psion netBook – a PDA in subnotebook form factor.
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Misschien weet je pas het Nederlandse woord voor?
(Let op: ik spreek geen Nederlands)
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I don't understand why there's so much of a quality difference between consumer products and business products either. For seven years I've worked for an organization which only uses HP desktops, laptops, and workstations, and I've always been exceedingly happy with them. And personally I only buy HP, but I've definitely noticed the difference between their consumer products and the products I love at work.
I had a Pavilion dv6236us for a while which had a high-pitched processor whine at too low or high a power level (I can't remember which). Apparently this was a very common issue with the Pavilions, and I had to run RMClock all the time to get rid of it. What kind of QA process doesn't notice something like that or deems it acceptable? I didn't really have any other issues though (if I recall, it did come with a clean Windows XP installation disc), and I do think they're much better than Dell and IBM as far as consumer laptops.
I assume consumer laptops are worse because salesmen on commission like "shiny" which you can immediately see, as opposed to durability and stability, which you can't. Random aside: What model of laptop/tablet is that, blakeyrat? It looks like the EliteBook 2730p I won at a conference which is my preferred machine, but mine doesn't have any LEDs around the screen and has quite a nice keyboard; it's my preferred machine. I wonder if we're on alternate sides of the consumer/business divide.
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@heterodox said:
What model of laptop/tablet is that, blakeyrat?
It's an HP 1000tx. There's also an 1100tx with the same design.
Edited to remove bad speculation on my part after actually *gasp* spending a few moments to research.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Misschien weet je pas het Nederlandse woord voor?
(Let op: ik spreek geen Nederlands)
voorstukkie
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@dhromed said:
voorstukkie
Oops. Google doesn't know that word. Pressing backspace gets me voorstuk =
foreach()for each but that's it.
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try voorste stuk.
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Now look up "eend".
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No quack.
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OK, well, you've lost me now. It's not the translation that's confusing me. Were you expecting the duck to have wheels?
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@heterodox said:
For seven years I've worked for an organization which only uses HP desktops, laptops, and workstations, and I've always been exceedingly happy with them. And personally I only buy HP, but I've definitely noticed the difference between their consumer products and the products I love at work.
The only good HP machines were the old dc7700's... these literally go on and on. Ditto for the d730 series (we've got a couple of old ones running as FreeBSD servers around the place and they chug along quite happily).The school I was at bought about 100 to 120 Dells (so about four computer rooms worth), and then went and changed to HPs (I suspect money was the main motivation) and bought about 160 of them. Out of the Dells, I think two, maybe a third had issues: one needed its RAM reseated (simple five minute fix by the IT department) and one wouldn't wake up all the time so Dell support had a tech in (to our dismal backwater town five hours drive from any capital city no less) next day, who replaced the PSU and motherboard, after which it then worked perfectly. The IT staff were pretty happy with Dell support, too. The HP's, on the other hand, were hell. One room had three dead computer for about a month because HP support are awful and basically kept giving them the brush. All of them suffered from poor case design where the power button could get stuck and the computer would get stuck in a state of not-quite-on-but-not-quite-off until it was unstuck, at which point it would turn off. The worst thing that happened to the Dell's was that either someone would rotate the Dell logo on the front so that it was vertical, or someone would take the rubber band out of the optical drive (then again, they did that to the HP's too). Since then, they bought a batch of craptastic HP ProBooks (I think about 24 plus one for each of the teachers so that would make it 125ish), and then started buying Dell Vostros for the students.@heterodox said:(if I recall, it did come with a clean Windows XP installation disc)
No laptop that I have seen comes with any kind of disc these days, instead all insisting that you make your own. @heterodox said:and I do think they're much better than Dell and IBM as far as consumer laptops.
Look at the ThinkPad Edge. Not only would it be suitable to a small business (especially with the optional red lid), they make awesome consumer machines: I recommended one based solely on specs to a friend (An i5, 500GB hard drive, 4GB RAM and a AMD Radeon 6630M 1GB switchable graphics was about $600 plus $1 for a 500GB external hard drive direct from Lenovo, similar specs from any other manufacturer started at $1000 minimum), and when she got it she fell in love with it, especially the bright red lid, which kinda made me want to steal it for myself. A couple of other people I know got them too simply because, at the price, they could not be beat, and they are awesome machines. Dell consumer laptops... to put it simply, I've always been a fan of business grade laptops (currently owning a Thinkpad and will probably buy another one this year) and don't recommend much else to others unless they've got a tiny budget (in which case I usually say "get more money").
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My company switched from Dell to HP some time ago.
There were some problems, including one whole batch of hardware having a sub-par quality component, which failed in all the units at roughly the same time.
HP sent a repair tech onsite (100 miles or so) the next day, he swapped the parts... one of his brand new replacements was also faulty... so he came again the next day and finished it. Extended warranty is a must-have here, I guess. ;)
Another funny part is that they ship laptops with the crappy suicidal Hitachi HDDs, but when these die, the replacements are always some other manufacturer. ;)
As of Dell, honestly, it wasn't any better. First of all, Dell's policy of "always install a refurbished part first" is depressing. They were replacing the same part, in the same PC, three times. One of these was because the refurb itself had a different component broken already (which we of course noticed only a week later), other was total death. Brand new board - and it runs happily ever since.
Now, in the "consumer" section, Pavillions are just insane. As in "if it claims to give you 2x better specs for half the price, it's obvious they cut some corners..." and they do. Lots of models with inadequalte cooling that literally melted down. Cases that fall apart. Issuing a recall of faulty mainboards on one model, but not another one with 100% the same mainboard suffering from the same problem.
Dell's cheapest line (I never remember... Dimension?) is just as bad. Difference here is that Dell has better "home" lines. Even the Studios are tolerable.
Said that, if I could afford it, I'd get a Thinkpad.
I can't, so I don't have a laptop at all.
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@Douglasac said:
The only good HP machines were the old dc7700's [...] The HP's, on the other hand, were hell.
This just goes to show how diverse experiences can be in the IT field and why overgeneralizations are all ignorant (Irony!).
We have HP ProLiant servers that have chugged along for years without needing any maintenance whatsoever. I think occasionally hard drives have failed (most of our servers have RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 arrays), and we just order a new drive, pop the old one out, and replace it while the server's still running. We've had 99.99% uptime for as long as I can remember, and unlike most server software, I do love HP's agents which expose a ridiculous amount of information via SNMP which I can then use in our network monitoring system.
As far as desktops and laptops, we have a low budget, but we make sure to buy quality desktops and laptopss the first time around so they'll last a long time. I believe we're trying to institute a five-year lifecycle for all desktops, but we have some desktops in the wild that have been around for eight years which have had no problems and still perform fine for their users' purposes. I have been incredibly impressed by HP's dx series for desktops, the 6530b+ for laptops, and the xw2400/xw4200 workstations.
On the other hand, I was a help desk manager for a university that only used Dell and sold Dell to the students (I believe this was called the Dell Computing Initiative program or some such). Sure, I only saw the ones that weren't working, but there were a hell of a lot of those and Dell support regularly made me want to tear my hair out; they were completely inept and I'd find myself having to send the same systems to them over and over again until lemon policies kicked in (and they had ridiculous turnaround times that our users hated). I've always been thrilled by HP support.
The software that came on the Dell laptops made me want to throw them against a wall too; there was one program I can't remember that disabled the Ethernet port when a laptop was on battery then almost always failed to re-enable it by not noticing the laptop was now on AC, meaning we'd have to restart computers to get them on Ethernet so we could get them on wireless (these were the old days).
Anywho.
@Douglasac said:
@heterodox said:
(if I recall, it did come with a clean Windows XP installation disc)
No laptop that I have seen comes with any kind of disc these days, instead all insisting that you make your own.Again, diverse experiences. I can't recall any laptop I've ever bought that didn't have an operating system installation disc, either because I made sure it came with one or requested one. I even got one for a netbook that had no optical drive. (I have an external, so I was happy).
@Douglasac said:
@heterodox said:
and I do think they're much better than Dell and IBM as far as consumer laptops.
Look at the ThinkPad Edge.Thinkpads suck. (See how abrasive overgeneralizations are?) I will freely admit that all Thinkpads I've used have been more than five years old, so my mileage varies from yours. I shouldn't overgeneralize. But I have wanted to take a sledgehammer to every one of those Thinkpads I've used.
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Proliants were Compaq's design, HP just never managed to totally fuck them up.
Fun part here - right after HP-Compaq merger, "HP" brand laptops suddenly started to look exactly like Compaq Armada laptops did before, while "Compaq" brand laptops became thick and rounded, precisely like pre-merge HP Omnibooks, and so crappily made they've broken up before they even finished booting...
... and please don't make me start at the crapomination the "Compaq" branded laptops are today.
As for the recovery discs, all of our Dell Latitudes, Dell Optiplexes, and HP Probooks did come with a CD.
Not that we care - every company larger than 10 PCs have a WDS-deployed unified OS image to maintain consistency... right?
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@bannedfromcoding said:
Proliants were Compaq's design, HP just never managed to totally fuck them up.
True. I recall some of them used to say "HP Compaq ProLiant" in msinfo32 and on HP's Web site (though I just checked a ML350 and it seems they're all solely HP-branded in both places now). I've heard good things about HP's blade servers, but I can't attest to them personally (as much as I'd like to play with them).
@bannedfromcoding said:
Fun part here - right after HP-Compaq merger, "HP" brand laptops suddenly started to look exactly like Compaq Armada laptops did before, while "Compaq" brand laptops became thick and rounded, precisely like pre-merge HP Omnibooks, and so crappily made they've broken up before they even finished booting...
Interesting. Is the 6510b in the latter style? I've noticed it's rather thick, even before we slap the 16-hour batteries on them. The 6530b is quite attractive though, without being glossy. It's about time HP figured out how to do that. Anyway, I don't know anything about Compaq machines except the really old Compaq desktops we used to have, which were second only to eMachines in how much I hated them.
@bannedfromcoding said:
Not that we care - every company larger than 10 PCs have a WDS-deployed unified OS image to maintain consistency... right?
Well, in our case, we use Symantec Ghost, though we're really going to have to figure out how to put the image on a hard disk partition and keep it updated because I'll be damned if we're going to keep pulling a switch and plugging an entire cart of laptops into Ethernet to ghost them (I'll also be damned before anyone tries ghosting over wireless).
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@heterodox said:
@bannedfromcoding said:
Fun part here - right after HP-Compaq merger, "HP" brand laptops suddenly started to look exactly like Compaq Armada laptops did before, while "Compaq" brand laptops became thick and rounded, precisely like pre-merge HP Omnibooks, and so crappily made they've broken up before they even finished booting...
Interesting. Is the 6510b in the latter style? I've noticed it's rather thick, even before we slap the 16-hour batteries on them. The 6530b is quite attractive though, without being glossy. It's about time HP figured out how to do that. Anyway, I don't know anything about Compaq machines except the really old Compaq desktops we used to have, which were second only to eMachines in how much I hated them.
Well, after a decade the styling kinda faded out. ;) If I should say anything, the 6510 looks kinda Dell-ish, and 6530 looks pretty nice, but neither really reminds me of laptops from early 2000s (and that's good :P).
Oh yeah - one thing I have to say about HP - their current laptop keyboards are really cool compared to Dell ones, at least in my opinion. I mean those like in HP 5320m or 6460b (tho the double-height arrow keys are weird in the latter). Dell D-series and E-series are disgustingly "soft", and because of lack of gaps between keys extremely prone to pressing two keys when you want one. Not to mention the edit-block being put at top of keyboard - HP's vertical at the right is just about perfect for a laptop. Asus and Lenovo does the mistake of putting Fn in bottom left, making me press it instead of Ctrl.
Btw, were these "really old desktops" pre- or post-2000?
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@bannedfromcoding said:
Oh yeah - one thing I have to say about HP - their current laptop keyboards are really cool compared to Dell ones, at least in my opinion. I mean those like in HP 5320m or 6460b (tho the double-height arrow keys are weird in the latter).
I love the feel of their laptop keyboards too, though as you say the layout can vary weirdly from model to model.
@bannedfromcoding said:
Btw, were these "really old desktops" pre- or post-2000?
I don't really remember, but if I had to guess, I'd say they were somewhere from 2001-2004.
Edit: Just looked it up; they were C733s and I hated them (as I said, but clearly I can't say it enough).
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@heterodox said:
The software that came on the Dell laptops made me want to throw them against a wall too; there was one program I can't remember that disabled the Ethernet port when a laptop was on battery then almost always failed to re-enable it by not noticing the laptop was now on AC, meaning we'd have to restart computers to get them on Ethernet so we could get them on wireless (these were the old days).
Oh boy. Dell QuickSet. Retarded beyond belief. I've seen a laptop where the only way to cure this fault (without removing QuickSet, anyway) was to uninstall the Ethernet adapter in Device Manager and reboot, allowing Windows to put back just the Ethernet driver without all the QuickSet hooks that for no reason keep disabling the Ethernet adapter. We were finding that it was disabling the adapter at the device level, and the only way to re-enable it was through Device Manager as an administrator – a reboot with the AC adapter connected never worked. (Possibly QuickSet had a "just work" button, except the affected machine was at the other end of a telephone connection without a network connection.)
Dell's XP factory installs after Vista came out really went downhill, and they did annoying things like configure a 15-minute standby that all users inherit from the default configuration; bear in mind that XP bans normal users from changing power configuration, and there's no Group Policy for power prior to Vista. The default setting can be corrected by mounting the Default User hive and changing the power scheme to Always On, or by just nuking and paving. Standby isn't necessarily bad (Explorer bugs with folder redirection notwithstanding) and they still set this to get their environmental pat on the back, but standby started crashing machines. A factory install with a 15-minute crash countdown. Fortunately Dell's OptiPlex factory installations for Windows 7 seem to be flawless (give or take the need to remove Bing Bar and a few other bits and bobs, saves reinstalling the whole OS and all the drivers).
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Oh boy. Dell QuickSet. Retarded beyond belief. I've seen a laptop where the only way to cure this fault (without removing QuickSet, anyway) was to uninstall the Ethernet adapter in Device Manager and reboot, allowing Windows to put back just the Ethernet driver without all the QuickSet hooks that for no reason keep disabling the Ethernet adapter.
Yep, that was it. And yeah, if restarting didn't work, we'd have to either netsh [interface ip/winsock] reset or just delete the device through Device Manager and scan for hardware changes (same as your solution, except I think we didn't have to restart). I think netsh winsock reset removed LSPs/other hooks they had in the stack, but I could be completely and utterly making that up.
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Standby isn't necessarily bad (Explorer bugs with folder redirection notwithstanding) and they still set this to get their environmental pat on the back, but standby started crashing machines.
Indeed, and if the machine did come back from standby, more likely than not it'd never connect to the wireless network again without a restart. Really, it's no wonder by the time I left 1/3 of all students were using Macs.
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For the record, I don't hate Dell, but after Vista came out, quality control for factory XP installs went down the toilet.
My main beef with Dell is that OptiPlex *90 machines are depicted with a gorgeous chrome grille on the front, and in reality it's chunky grey plastic. It's not even chrome-plated plastic, it's just rubbish metallic paint or metallic particles in the plastic that doesn't reflect any light. That was a real disappoinment when we got the first 390 in. (My complaint isn't about the product quality, rather the bald-faced lying in the product photos about the chrome finish. And they've gone overboard with blue LEDs now. Surely blue LEDs would be passé by now? I prefer HP's colour-coded LEDs.)
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@heterodox said:
Edit: Just looked it up; they were C733s and I hated them (as I said, but clearly I can't say it enough).
Oh, my... the master suck times. :(
My condolences.
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@Douglasac said:
The HP's, on the other hand, were hell. One room had three dead computer for about a month because HP support are awful and basically kept giving them the brush.
Is this desktop or server support? With servers, we never had any problems - the tech was always there next day after call, though I admit the worst problem we had with servers were hard drives failing. With desktops, it really depends on the repair shop - we worked with a certain firm for a long time, so if something broke (most commonly the hard drives), we'd just phone there, bring the broken disk, and leave with replacement. Recently the person we usually worked with changed jobs, and we did have a problem when we had to wait a month for motherboard replacement, but we've since switched to another shop, and it's back to normal.@Douglasac said:
No laptop that I have seen comes with any kind of disc these days, instead all insisting that you make your own.
I guess the pile of HP-branded XP, Vista and 7 installation discs around my desk at work is a fragment of my imagination then (interestingly, for a long time HP desktops didn't include normal install discs - just their restore crap, which writes a pre-installed image with a bunch of crapware, but the install discs for laptops work just fine on desktops - and require no activation).
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@heterodox said:
We have five techs where I work. Only one would pick a new HP over a new Dell (and even then it's not a case of cake or death, but which gun do you want to be shot by?).Then again, pretty much all the machines from the era of the dc7700's just never seem to die: the big ugly full plastic body Dell Optiplexes are a notable example: we've got three at work, one used by someone who remotes in occasionally and two as drop-in spares whenever someone has to bring their machine in and they for whatever reason need a loaner.This just goes to show how diverse experiences can be in the IT field and why overgeneralizations are all ignorant (Irony!).
@heterodox said:
We had a newish Dell server come in that had a dead hard drive, and when a new hard drive was put it in pretty much killed it straight away. We've yet to figure out if the server itself is doing it, or if it's just bad hard drives that it's gotten. This week, a HP server needed a bigger hard drive because the idiots who sold it to the client thought that 2 RAIDed 72GB hard drives when they had a database that was almost that big was a good idea.Apart from the insane 1.09GB firmware update for the hard drive (small drivers and the like has never been the strong point of HP, just look at their 97MB or thereabouts inkjet driver that doesn't have head cleaning functionality that my Epson's 15MB driver has), it would have been the best experience with HP that we have had in a long time (ie. ever)We have HP ProLiant servers that have chugged along for years without needing any maintenance whatsoever. I think occasionally hard drives have failed (most of our servers have RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 arrays), and we just order a new drive, pop the old one out, and replace it while the server's still running.
@heterodox said:
I have been incredibly impressed by HP's dx series for desktops, the 6530b+ for laptops,
I and my coworkers have not been, with the exception of one who liked one of the HP ProBooks that came in. I liked that it had a catch on the lid, and not much else beyond that.@heterodox said:
and the xw2400/xw4200 workstations.
Interestingly, this is another exception to the "HP machines are hopeless" rule: we've gotten a few refurbished ones in (The Boss has one at home and one as his work machine) and I can't fault them (apart from the ECC RAM which means we have to specially order it in for them, but it's a workstation so should be expected).@heterodox said:
Must be an American thing. No machine sold off the shelf here comes with discs. Very few CTO machines offer it as an option. I know Toshiba's don't (having had the, erm, privilege, I guess, of setting a great number of them up I know what they do and do not come with), Asus' pop up boxes complaining about recovery discs, as do the odd HP that clients bring in to us to set up, and Lenovo's don't really talk about it for whatever reason (and will charge you AU$90 if you ask for a set of discs from them). The last Dell I saw had a Resource Disc but I don't know if this was part of a set that included a Windows or recovery disc or not.Then again, you can always cheat and just use an OEM disc and the key on the COA. No crapware is always a bonus I find (have you seen how much crapware is shovelled on the average computer? Especially with a Toshiba, it is generally quicker to install Windows from an OEM disc, go to the Toshiba AU website only to find that they don't have a single driver for it (true story), then hop around the internet amongst Toshiba EU and Toshiba US and find a complete set of drivers for it then install them than it is to install the OS from the recovery image and decrapify it(Side note: does anyone from the US know if Toshibas there do the same godawful thing that they do here, and recover the system to the user's choice of 32 or 64bit Windows on first boot, thus taking two hours or so to install the OS and crap you don't want or need only to be removed?) @heterodox said:Again, diverse experiences. I can't recall any laptop I've ever bought that didn't have an operating system installation disc, either because I made sure it came with one or requested one. I even got one for a netbook that had no optical drive. (I have an external, so I was happy).
I will freely admit that all Thinkpads I've used have been more than five years old
The older ones are generally regarded as the better ones. That said, after having handled some T420s's, I kinda wanted to steal one for myself... they were pretty sturdy, had lovely trackpad with a nice texture to it, the usual awesome keyboard, and decent resolution (1600x900 is quite nice, and made me feel like my 1280x800 on my 14" machine was inferior so so much).@ender said:Is this desktop or server support?
Desktop, and on a government contract as well. Kinda makes me wish Ipex still did exist. At least they were competent.@ender said:
I guess the pile of HP-branded XP, Vista and 7 installation discs around my desk at work is a fragment of my imagination then (interestingly, for a long time HP desktops didn't include normal install discs - just their restore crap, which writes a pre-installed image with a bunch of crapware, but the install discs for laptops work just fine on desktops - and require no activation).
Either that, or you live in a different country to me and get them because that's part of your country's configuration (HP love changing the configuration on a country-by-country basis: I wondered why I couldn't find AMD drivers for a HP on their website when it turned out I was on the UK one and they only had the Intel variant there for whatever reason)@ender said:
Is this desktop or server support?
Desktop, and on a government contract as well. Kinda makes me wish Ipex still did exist. At least they were slightly competent, even if they did go insolvent.Then again, it could just be another case of HP, being an international US-based company, assuming that Australia is some backwater country and won't recognize substandard service when it comes our way.@ender said:
I guess the pile of HP-branded XP, Vista and 7 installation discs around my desk at work is a fragment of my imagination then (interestingly, for a long time HP desktops didn't include normal install discs - just their restore crap, which writes a pre-installed image with a bunch of crapware...
Either that, or aren't in Australia and get them because that's part of your country's configuration (HP love changing the configuration on a country-by-country basis: I wondered why I couldn't find AMD drivers for a HP on their website when it turned out I was on the UK one and they only had the Intel variant there for whatever reason... at least they're better than Epson who use a completely different model name and number in the US, the UK and Asia\Pacific) or live in Australia and manage to get them some other way (if this please tell me how because it might prove useful if its easily doable).@ender said:
but the install discs for laptops work just fine on desktops - and require no activation
The expected Magical OEM Auto Activating Thing that checks the BIOS to make sure that it's being used on a HP would match because they're both HP's, unless it's one of the weird ones which had Asus boards and came up as Asus machines as a result for whatever stupid reason.
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@Douglasac said:
The expected Magical OEM Auto Activating Thing that checks the BIOS to make sure that it's being used on a HP would match because they're both HP's, unless it's one of the weird ones which had Asus boards and came up as Asus machines as a result for whatever stupid reason.
Oh, I know very well how the OEM activation works - on XP it just needs a certain string to be present at the right address, while Vista and 7 require an ACPI table. At least with Windows 7, you can easily create an auto-activating install media by copying the sources$$ folder, and then entering the generic key for your edition (which you can get from another OEM install). The nice thing about doing this is that Windows will never deactivate, no matter how many hardware changes you do.
