ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Windows 8.1

Yes, I did the install, and so far I think it's helpful.

It is still a learning experience on that laptop.

Scott35:
Perhaps you had a California experience? 'Salesmen' here are hard to come by in that chain, although you can get 'help' at the customer service counter.

John,
I wouldn't go down that road unless you REALLY need to.
I'm forced to use an iPad at work to input all my job invoicing, I hate the thing with a passion, it's more suited to people with smaller fingers than me, I've just about worn a hole in the screen where the backspace "key" is on the screen, it has no cursor control keys, so if you need to change anything, you find yourself deleting quite a bit of text to get back to where you went wrong.
It's actually got to the point John, where I'll do most of my input stuff at home on a computer with a real keyboard and leave the iPad at work, so much for convenience.

Trumpy:

I was refering to an Apple laptop, not the ipad.

I have an i-phone, and use it to text, which are very short. I use it for email when I'm on the road and must reply, but I keep that very short also.

I thought of an ipad for my wife, but she had objections like you said above, so I got her a laptop also.

I bought a stylus to use on the phone to make it easier; drawback to that is I have to make sure it's in my pocket.

All good, John.
I think if you were going to go for anything Apple, you'd want to get a Laptop.
However as you said above, the cost and the software limitations make a decision like this very hard to make.

One thing that really annoys me about computers, is that you can't network different types together, I mean, I have 1 XP computer, 1 W7 computer, 1 Linux computer and my (work) iPad, NONE of these computers will talk to any of the others, not even the XP one and the W7 one, which I think is nothing short of rediculous, the only way you can share files between them all is with a USB stick, which the iPad doesn't have a port for anyway.
I thought it was all supposed to be about connectivity these days?

That is why I am still sticking with XP. It will talk to W/98 machines, DOS machines and even my ReplayTV DVR.

I understand there is a way to get W7 to talk to XP machines but it was not worth the hassle. I loaded XP over the W7 that came on my lap top.
I still have the disk if I want to go back but it is not likely soon. It is supposed to be added security on 7 that makes this harder but if someone gets a cable into my network, I have worse problems than them stealing my stolen music.

Greg,
I built a new desktop from scratch with W7 (Home Premium) on board.
I thought that I might be able to revert this to XP, no way is what the Man said.
One thing that REALLY annoys me about W7 is that it has no way to revert to Windows Media Player 10 (which is an XP version).
WMP12, has a really annoying compression function in the software, so when you go to listen to your music, the volume level goes up and bloody down, there is no way you can turn this off either, it is in-built into the software.
I'm currently trying to learn a whole orchestra opus as it pertains to double bass, WMP12 isn't even in the picture because it can't give a stable audio level.
I've heard that it is a "driver issue" from those at M$, bollocks, let's just pass the buck.

I have never even heard of that.
How is it "on board"? In ROM? There must be a way to disable that. Have you looked at the BIOS setup options?

Per the LAN Peer-To-Peer issue;

I had no problems bringing my New Win 7 OS Machine on to our existing 100BT Ethernet LAN, consisting of several Machines using Win XP OS (currently SP 3.xxx, or whatever the SP build was in March or April!).

One Machine on our LAN is quite "Mature"... The Disk Drives are IDE (actually, they are ATA...); the Processor is an AMD equivalent of a Pentium III (Not a Celeron, though!!!), and it uses PC 133 DRAM!
It's still using an older XP version - something like SP 2.5, or so.

Nevertheless, File Transfer / sharing, LAN Printing (and even One directly PC connected "Shared Printer"), as well as Internet / E-mail access through our ADSL Gateway, are all working properly between Machines with XP and W7 Operating Systems.

Workstation Setup was somewhat painless with the W7 Machine, it just took some time for me to comprehend the new terminology of the W7 Connectoid scheme, vs what I have grown use to for 10 Years in XP.
Compared to the days before Plug & Play, or for Greg; MCA, I really cannot complain too much... Not that setting hardware jumpers was all that difficult, the frustration came when POST/Bootstrap (IRQ80, or so) let you know of an Address conflict - which, for some reason you know that "03BCh" is available, you intend on setting the Jumpers for that Address, but instead you set them for "0278h" and upset either your Sound Card, or the Dual EPP/ECP Parallel Port Card on your ISA Bus!

Although I dealt with only a few MCA installations - primarily 4/16 Token Ring NICs or 10BT Ethernet NICs on IBM System 70 -ish Machines, with the occasional new Video Adapter installs, my MCA experience and study came shortly before PCI Bussing was released.

Similar to the Reverse Engineering of IBM's ROM BIOS on the XT 8088 (correction requested), so was the "Non-Proprietary" version of IBM's Microchannel Architecture:
.... The new high speed "Peripheral Component Interconnect" Bus - which incorporated "Plug & Play" capabilities (Software Configuration) inspired by the development of MCA.

PCI Bus speed was 33MHZ (IIRC), and MCA was either 16MHZ, or 25MHZ (IIRC). Both eliminated those annoying Bottleneck issues of the elder 8/16MHZ ISA Bus, which kept the Machine from entering Boat Anchor Mode from endless waitstates.

Well, I really do not know what got me on this PCI Bus Tangent, other than My wife's Aunt is forcing us to drink Beer and Rum..., so let me return to that before She gets upset and breaks out the Tequila!!!

--Scott (EE)

Update, yesterday.
Had a few updates from Toshiba, and 'let it rip'.

Laptop reboots and ......a 'Repair' screen takes over.
Potion was to 'refresh' which maintains my files
OK, hit 'refresh'....come back in half hour.

Now back to square one, W8, no 8.1 and cannot do the update to 8.1 because 'previous required updates are not in'.

Not being a computer wiz, looked around carefully for a 'maintenance' schedule which installs the updates that are required. Think I found it somewhere, and it's 6PM when the PC is 'on & on 120 volt power'.

Does the above sound right?