Computer Disaster Corner

[struth]

I wanted to buy a laptop from the 'refurbished' seller Grant linked to, but Anita had other ideas - as it is a Christmas gift for me (using it already!) she wanted to buy new.

It's a pretty low-spec one,only costing £250. Don't ask me about the specifications, I've no idea. The discussion in the shop was almost entirely between Anita and the shop's tech guy. Now I know how my kids felt when they came with me to motorcycle dealerships

This thing has a lot more buttons and it's going to take a while to get used to it (I've never made so many spelling mistakes), and I haven't worked out how to 'right click' yet, as I found out earlier when trying to include a link.

I don't like change. Maybe I should have got the old one fixed and got a dozen new albums instead...

think its shift and f10

[Pigmy Pony]

I imagine it would be easier, and ideal if I was seated at a desk or table. But I always use it while on the sofa. With the old lappy I just clicked on the right hand side of that big clicky area, but this does nothing on the new one. It has to be one of these buttons, I'll consult with the brains of the outfit when she gets up

[struth]

if youve the 3 buttons above the pad its the right one, or is on mine. but tried shift f10 too and both work om my zbook

[walpurgis]

You should find the manual online.

[walpurgis]

i always fit a mouse to my lappys... much easier

I used a thumb trackball with my laptop years ago. Great to use as you could just lean back in the chair and do what was needed, but they kept wearing out.

[Pigmy Pony]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, it looks like it's sorted now

[walpurgis]

Well, my PC monitor packed up earlier, good job I could borrow the one from the missus computer. Found another cheap used monitor for sale on ebay 1/4 mile away from me and bought it. Hopefully sorted now!

Can't really grumble, I got near ten years out of the old one and that was second hand .

Picked up the ebay monitor last night, the seller address was 500 yards away . It's a 22" LG and like new condition, very clear picture, nice. OK for thirty quid I reckon. I'd have a larger one , but don't really have room.

[walpurgis]

This is an interesting read.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/...t_30_years_on/

[AJSki2fly]

This is an interesting read.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/...t_30_years_on/

Yep, and most of it is pretty accurate.

I worked on the first release of a Windows NT development in EU in 1991-93 for one of the banking institutions with about 100 others. It was a workflow system using Windows NT Gold(pre-release of NT 3.1). The system was developed in house with Visual C++ and Visual Basic and some other stuff, we had direct access to Microsoft engineers and developers for support. The servers and desktops were not cheap, I think around £25-30K for one server without storage and we used 4 different ones, the desktop Workstations were at least £3K each. I suppose if you add inflation then today they would cost about 6 times that. I ran the test/implementation team, the system integrated with early Interactive Voice Response(IVR) which interfaced with support team end users at workstations, we document laser scanners and image storage was done on laser discs machines that looked like washing machines. It was what you could genuinely call 'Bleeding Edge Technology' at the time. As I understand it the core of the system is still in use today, although the Servers, physical IVR, scanning and storage methods have improved somewhat. I ran Windows NT at home on ridiculously expensive PC with just about enough RAM to support it, so I could keep up with it and the rapid changes. It took about 3 hours to install initially around 16 floppy disks, remember those, a year or so down from that CD-Rom came along. Windows NT back then was a tricky beast, it worked but if the HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer) on boot up did not recognise an installed piece of hardware it would either crash or install a generic Drivers/DLLs, which often would be problematic. Change installed hardware in a machine at your peril. What made it worse was that 3rd party manufactures would often change chipset versions on boards, like GPUs, Network cards and others, with no integration testing with NT having been, a recipe for disaster. This was nearly the downfall of Microsoft as it got completely away from them until they went down the recommended and supported developer and hardware list route.

Interesting if somewhat fraught times.

[walpurgis]

Interesting if somewhat fraught times.

Yes. Even before Microsoft I had a friend who was excited about the genesis of PC's, writing code to cassettes half a lifetime ago. I think Windows just getting established by the time he smoked himself to death.