folkus

Thanks folks. I have enough bricks already and not looking for a second fireplace. I appreciate the thoughtful warnings.

Bill_de Loc: US

I once started to do a firmware update with a battery that needed to be charged. I got a low power warning and the update did nothing until I replaced the battery. I don't recall which camera other than it was a Nikon DSLR.

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burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I was merely pointing out the slooow adoption rate of newer versions of Windows. Microsoft keeps having to kill support for its older OS before corporate IT groups will upgrade. XP is still in use for some applications. Win 7 support dies in early 2020, but Win 10 adoption is still under 60%. There are innumerable problems when companies try to run 30-year-old software on new OSes.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Funny. Actually with Windows it as far as Full versions go, they alternate.

of the ones I've used or know about:

3.1 Good.
95 A Joke. Introduction to a concept at best.
98 Good.
2000 Crazy paranoid slow checking everything when Booting or Running.
ME N/A No Idea, I guess a consumer variant of 2000, likely better.
CE No opinion -- used for interacting with non-work station machines like cash registers.
XP Good.
VISTA Crap, Crashes Nearly Daily. Nice Interface though.
7 Great! MS might have stopped there but by then had chased a lot of customers away.
8 Made No Sense Using A Hand Held Device O/S On A PC.
8.1 A Quick Fix Of 8 And Usable If You Have A Touch Screen.

<MS came close to sinking themselves with 8/8.1 since most Peeps use iPhone or Android Phones and Tabs.>

[no "Windows 9" as files in O/S could be confused with 95/98/98SE Code. Yet Windows is still filled with files labelled "*.386.*," "_386.*" and similar.]

10 MS seems to have redeemed themselves with new up to date computer users -- works fantastic for me -- when MS is not spying on me or limiting my choices.

But I know Mac or Linux users don't care...

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

Interesting assessment. I had a couple of machines with Vista. Worked well and with absolutely no problems for me. Did require more resources, which I'm sure created problems on machines that weren't quite up to snuff.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 A pretty accurate assessment in my opinion.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I agree, but both you and Tri-X missed the point of my reply to his post.

IT managers are slow to adopt upgrades and updates, *especially* when it comes to Windows. Many companies are still using Win 7, despite the fact that support for it dies in early January, 2020. Win 10 adoption is still under 60%, despite what, three and a half years since its release?

The OS is okay... It’s IT folks and bean counters who can’t plan to avoid unnecessary disasters that confuse me.

My former employer was still using Win XP when I left in 2012, because some of their mission critical apps were FoxPro databases written in the early 1990s, and they could not get them to run on Vista or Win 7.

It seemed like they would have had a re-write in progress, but no plan even existed for that. The prevailing sentiment was that management would not allocate resources until Something Really Bad happened.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Ah, now I see your point Bill. Fortunately, most servers run Linux, but the clients, of course, typically are PCs or Macs. Attrition will eventually cure this problem, as almost all new Windows machines ship with Windows 10.

Cheers

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Win 10 is probably the best OS Microsoft has released, now that it has been updated and updated and fixed and updated... They have made a few blunders with it along the way, but nothing like Vista or 8.0.

Of course, any software that is ever finished is abandoned in favor of an upgrade... I don't think that's a cynical statement. It's been reality for me on Windows and MacOS.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Actually I used VISTA for a long but miserable time on my old LapTop. Liked the interface. Perhaps the issue was more the computer. It was purchased new with VISTA at the time, but it was a HP LapTop. Had nothing but trouble with that top of the line 18" LapTop. Cost a bundle too. I've now decided newer HP products are junk. Unlike their seventies pocket calculators that I still have and use. My current system as I keep pointing out is a Dell XPS9800 running factory Win 10.

I've commented to my wife's coworkers that some of them that are still using Windows XP should be very careful of a virus attack. She works for a school district (main business office not school site) and they are very slow and cautious about changing O/S. My wife's work PC is running Win 7, but some others are still on XP as noted. The PC work stations are networked to a mainframe.

A side note: A friend of mine got a long term temp job at a very high pay rate to debug, audit, edit, and document a lot of COBAL machine programming and machine code because the company could not find any current staff that knew how to. This was with in the last two years! Seems COBAL and FORTRAN are still alive somewhere! Compiler programs as I remember, yikes!

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

Because of some older software I had and needed that was never updated by the publisher, I kept a laptop running XP until it died from hardware failure a couple of years ago. It was a strictly offline machine that was never connected to any network.

Microsoft published a Vista Readiness Assessment that could be run to help determine whether a specific machine would be able to run Vista successfully. I had one machine that the assessment said would not work. I tried anyway and found that yea, verily, Vista would not run acceptably on that machine. I suspect many folks never ran the assessment before loading or upgrading to Vista.

In your case, it sounds like HP didn't run it either.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

LOL. That is exactly what it seemed like from my many calls to HP. The computer had hardware issues of its own too that HP said they were trying to fix for me but never did. Subsequent models did not have those hardware features I noticed. That Laptop came with what was standard at the time 4GB RAM just enough to run 64-bit programs (barely). I later upped it to 6GB, then to 8GB. My newer Dell Tower I have now has 32GB RAM!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Cobol and Fortran persist because companies don't want to "fix" what "isn't broken" until it breaks for good. It's bull-headed $#!+ like that that causes business failures. Pretty soon, the folks who wrote those systems will be so old they won't remember how to code them. If not that, the hardware will break down or become too expensive to repair.

Managers and execs love to complain about the "forced obsolescence" of the modern computer world. But they fail to calculate the very significant risks of NOT keeping up. Those can include security vulnerabilities, and lost opportunity costs of improved efficiency. They don't realize what a real blessing it can be to churn equipment and software every five years or so.

I'm sure my FileMaker Pro 5.5 database solutions from 16 years ago would still run just fine, if needed, but they would have to run on Win 2000 or XP, and those machines would have to be firewalled off of the Internet. The computers, OSes, and software have come so far now, that complete rewrites would be required — and would probably pay for themselves rather quickly, given sufficient demand for the products they were designed to produce. (FileMaker 17 can't even read those old database files. The database structure is quite different now.)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Those HP laptops of the 2000s really sucked. Somebody gave my kids an HP "Lance Armstrong Edition" laptop with Vista on it. Unlike the cyclist, it hadn't been infused with speed-boosting performance enhancing drugs... It was always slow as molasses, because it was always installing Microsoft updates or checking for viruses. It barely had enough resources to run the damned virus checker! Then, if you tried to do anything it didn't like, you got a nasty nag-o-gram dialog asking, "Are you sure???" I felt like the Microsoft police were looking over my shoulder at all times.

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

Believe it or not, updated versions of FORTRAN are still available. It's even been morphed somewhat to be a "structured" programming language. As far as I know, it is still the preferred language for numerical supercomputers...nothing faster.