Weekend support - friends and family
I spent an interesting weekend giving support to my friends with Windows. It is not for the love of it you understand, but one of the boat anchors I carry around having worked for Microsoft years ago is that some people think that I am an authority on Windows. It caused me to come to an Occams Razor conclusion in two parts.
Firstly, Windows continues to be *way* too complex for people at home. It does not meet the use cases and capabilities of the end users concerned. For exmple many people refuse to acceptany need to know anything whatsoever about their systems and therefore blunder along until the inevitable data loss disaster. At the very least they run often run systems that are woefully poorly installed by the originak equipment manufacturers (OEMS) and poorly updated, optimised, and protected.
Secondly, the world has changed. Windows 7 computers from OEM’s at the ‘Tesco’ level now have 4GB of memory and 64 bit Windows preloaded. In a stroke this move to 64bit Windows 7 obsoletes the Vista and XP 32bit world. Soon everyone will put their old laptops out to landfill and go all sparkly x64. Why? It is always the same reason - device drivers. As we move forward it is a short matter of time before x64 only starts to be the norm.
What does this all mean?
Well I suppose we should buy Microsoft stock. The last lot of woefully bad home laptops and desktops which shipped with 32 bit Vista but weren’t really up to the job are fast approaching oblivion. The early adopters of XP in the home are running creaky crapola that is for the scrapheap. The nuclear option is easiest for home users. Buy a new one rather than figure out what could be optimised.
A case study of many Windows computers and complex options
My friend has four PC’s at home. A work based desktop running XP Pro. He is under pressure to get his personal iTunes and stuff off it. So the family also have three laptops. The three laptops are all different. One is an XP model bought for the student doing his GCSE’s the Christmas Vista came out. It struggles with graphics, and a smallish slow 30GB disk. The second is a Toshiba running Windows Vista, but it was not really designed for Windows Vista. The Vista capable program was rather re-engineered to make it compatible at the sticker level. It has 2GB of RAM but it really is slow in everything it tries to achieve. So slow as to be almost unusable in my opinion.
My friend announced that they he had learned the secrets of Windows and defragmented the disk - as if this was the magic cure all of all known issues with Windows Vista.
The trouble with this laptop is as follows:
- It has a 5400 rpm drive which is a slug
- It has insufficient FSB and IO for Vista
- It has insufficient memory for Windows Vista and all the loaded apps
- It has insufficient graphics capability for speed in Vista.
- It runs Windows Vista pre SP1 which is slow, annoying, and difficult to use.
The third laptop my friend announced proudly was dual core - so it he assumed it had two drives. I explained it was a Core2 Duo with two processor cores on one piece of Silicon. It is a good computer though - it is a newish Toshiba model with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. It has snappy if not great performance and is pre-loaded with Windows 7 64bit. They had bought it to take over from the Vista one - which was only 14 months old.
Do you see a pattern here. More computers arrive, but the old ones do not go, they hang around. Now they have 4 computers each with different operating systems (The desktop runs Windows XP Pro, Laptops run Windows XP Home, Vista and 7)
And herein lies the problem.
My friend runs a business on ebay using the Vista computer. The computer has a 180GB drive which has 90GB free on a second partition, and 90GB used on the boot partition. I explained that Windows was pre-installed poorly or because of some hardware necessity onto two partitions and talked over the options.
Note. First we backed up the computer. It had two years data on it, and had never been backed up. We did this using the Windows Vista backup tool. I dont like backups that do not back up *everything* including apps, system state and structure, but it was the only tool we had avaliable.
Here were the options as I saw them.
- Go into Control Panel, Switch to Classic View, Choose Administrative Tools, Choose Computer Management, Access the Disk Management tool, Delete the second partition, extend the first partition to the whole disk. My friend should not need to understand all this - and does not. Anyway we tried this and it failed. Windows Vista was not playing ball. I recreated the second partition.
- Back up the partitions on the hard disk to an external disk using a tool like Acronis True Image 2010, then rebuild the computer with a hard disk partition that spanned the whole disk. Perhaps not surpisingly my friend did not understand why this was so complicated, and did not know why it was potentially so invasive and risky.
- Move iTunes data to the empty drive. Far from ideal, this freed up just 20GB of space on the boot drive which means the problem goes away until another day when the ebay data and photogtraphs fill up the disk again. We settled for this.
My solution, if it were me, would be to use the replacement laptop - blow the disk data onto an external disk, and restore it to the new Windows 7 laptop and toss the Vista one away. Failing that reinstall it from scratch with Windows 7 (or perhaps even Windows XP SP3) across one volume that spanned the whole disk.
My friends cant see the point of this, and instead opt to keep the laptops as they are on XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Then they asked me to help them sort out why only some of their computers could print properly to their HP network printer. I explained that they needed potentially quite different drivers for each computer. But they are all Windows they cried. Yes, but XP Home, Pro, Vista 32bit and Windows 7 64bit no doubt have large differences.
My solution if it were me, would be to have only one operating system. I know through years of experience that this is a better place to be. I would not like to think of the number of hours wasted messing about with this stuff or all the aspects of their computing environment that could be so much better were they to take a little more time to think about their home network and computing environment.
This is why I have a Mac based home network at home. We all run the same OS, because I have a family pack which means it is easy for us all to stay on the same release. We all use the same Mac OS X Server, where we all back up using Time Machine and I keep periodic clones of our operating systems and all our data is mirrored for safety. If a mac needs replacing to it can be used in target disk mode which means that copying, fixing, updating and cloning it to a new Mac is easy.
But of course Macs are more expensive, as my brother in law told me yesterday afternoon when he popped by, explaining that he has bought a Toshiba with 64bit Windows 7 installed on it. He was wondering whether any of his applications would work on it - particularly Office XP or whether he should ‘downgrade’ to 32 bit windows which was also in the box. My answer which more or less equated to “who cares - if you didn’t know this why did you buy it” but which I sort of grumpily modified to “leave it on x64 as it has the longest shelf life” - did not go down all that well, but then he hadn’t had my experience on Saturday with my friends mishmash of computing.
Given that my friend has bought a new laptop every 12-14 months for the last four years while we have kept the same my Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro for home it seems to me that my friend and my brother in law better watch their total cost of ownership.
Mac OS X is not perfect, but it is certainly easier to manage, especially in a default family setting with a Time Capsule backup / wireless router. I never ever have to think about whether anything works or deal with the complex partition issues. Of course Mac OS X has complexity especially on the Server variant and it can get to a whole stratospheric level of UNIX difficultness and geekery.
Send the old junk to the landfill.
Out of the box, Mac OS X is better suited to family life than Windows because it is designed at heart to be easier for end users without a computing background to keep on the latest release because it is simpler to clone copy and update. All of which may change now Windows 7 x64 has arrived. But not until all the old laptops and desktops go to the landfill. And they won't - that is the problem.
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