PC sales drop to 2007 levels

boing
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Oblig.

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I replaced my 2009 imac (Core 2 duo, 9400m) with a 2014 imac (5k display, amd m290x, i5) somewhat recently. It’s like a whole new machine!

Of course, had I not gone into the whole all in one Apple thing, I could have purchased a machine with the option to upgrade the storage and graphics-- both of which were holding me back. But then I wouldn’t have gotten a 5k screen.

Can I game at 5K? Not unless the game is a couple of years old. In that respect, the video card is already obsolete. And I’m going to be stuck with it for a couple of years. Oh well.

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I bought a windows laptop last week - I was forced to for the hardware we are developing (a camera) will benefit from the latest CPU and 980M GPU chip for testing purposes.

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BUY A WINDOWS LAPTOP

  1. Windows 10 is a spyware-laden clusterfuck.

  2. The USB chip inside our camera (made by Cypress - THE usb chip company) doesn’t have a driver for windows 10 yet. OK whatever. Let’s install Windows 7. Can’t do it. Need to change from UEFI to “legacy” mode in the BIOS. Still windows 7 doesn’t want to install. But now the system doesn’t recognize the m2 ssd that windows 10 is installed on, so the computer doesn’t boot up at all. And I can’t even access the BIOS anymore either. OMFG.

OK, so let’s install windows 8. Ok, that installs. SSD magically reappears but I still can’t boot from it.

Finally I figure out that there is a bug in the BIOS, where changing it to legacy mode makes it impossible to access the BIOS again. (Wow it is literally a self-destruct setting in the BIOS). So I update the BIOS on a computer for the first time since last century.

NEVER AGAIN.

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Running current OS X on that?

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There is no way to truly secure XP and no service pack could do it. Anyone running XP on a network at this point is an idiot waiting to join a botnet. Seriously.

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So you’re using a terminal to a mainframe?

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You don’t have their own WSUS boxes? I only get patches for the work machine from the company servers and they get to decide what patches do and in this case don’t get applied.

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There’s also the fact phones and tablets have largely taken up the casual browsing market, so far less reason to get a full blown computer.

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If newer Windows versions could be made secure (they can’t) then XP could be made secure. It got a major overhaul with SP2, and it could get another one.

Yes, the average home user “running XP on a(n internet-connected) network at this point is an idiot waiting to join a botnet.”

But many businesses on the other hand stopped relying on Windows itself for security a long time ago. An accountant clicking on an infected encrypted-to-prevent-scanning PDF invoice is getting that ransomware even on newer Windows versions.

And so they have a firewall appliance watching for malware threats. Anti-virus on the mail server removing malware attachements - including ANY encrypted PDF - before they get to the PCs. And some form of third-party endpoint protection on the PCs - not just scanning for viruses, but other things like blocking executables on USB ports all but a few directories.

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I worked on SP2. I also work in security for a living.

Don’t run XP. If you do, it is your own fault when (not if) you get owned.

The underlying framework to XP can only be secured so much. It is a 14 year old operating system designed in a world where we understood security less. Microsoft has no financial incentive to do anything like the kind of work necessary to rewrite it when it has released four versions of windows, all inherently more secure, since then.

At the very least, run an up to date windows 7.

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Running Yosemite. Thinking about replacing my 500GB HD with a 1TB SSD, then perhaps will move to the captain. Might move to 6 GB RAM from 4GB but figure the SSD will be a better investment. 667 chips are so expensive relative to the 1333’s…[quote=“enso, post:24, topic:72040”]
Ironic. My last computer purchase was in 2007. Can’t kill my 17-inch MBP

Running current OS X on that?
[/quote]

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I found that my 2011 era MacBook Air really bogged down with only 4 GB of RAM in current versions of OS X.

It runs Ubuntu fine though!

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[quote=“enso, post:30, topic:72040”]
The underlying framework to XP can only be secured so much. It is a 14 year old operating system designed in a world where we understood security less.[/quote]
My point here is that Windows 7 isn’t much more secure. It needs to be backward compatible AND it needs to let users do things like open encrypted PDFs that it can’t scan. And so in both cases your protection is only as good as the OTHER measures you take.

[quote=“enso, post:30, topic:72040”]
Microsoft has no financial incentive to do anything like the kind of work necessary to rewrite it when it has released four versions of windows, all inherently more secure, since then.[/quote]
And here my point is that this is deliberate (and of course making good financial sense on Microsoft’s part.) For users, an SP2-style overhaul would have done the job security-wise - even if it broke some backward compatibility like SP2 did. For everything else, a 12-year-old WinXP machine still does the job perfectly fine for most business apps.

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SP2 took the entire Windows division to do and we spent over eight months doing it. It cost the company many millions of dollars and delayed other projects by years.

Don’t expect Microsoft to do that again, especially for a system about a decade out of real support.

Actually, Windows 7 is dramatically more secure than XP.

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You want the GWX control panel which will kill that GWX shit stone dead that microsoft are determined to infect any machine they can with. As well as deleting the multi-gigabyte files automatically downloaded and getting you out of the upgrade now or defer option many have found themselves stuck in. Microsoft have now become a malware vendor and the GWX malware is only going to get more aggressive this year.

edit: And so it goes… http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsitpro/archive/2016/01/13/making-it-easier-for-small-businesses-to-upgrade-to-windows-10.aspx

Bastards.

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In activity monitor, what’s the “Memory Pressure” like?

Startup time is really strange benchmark to use, unless you dual boot, or shut down a lot. But

You’ll probably get more use out of the SSD-- sometimes Apple assumes that it’s there. Unless your memory pressure is “red” or “yellow”, use a lot of photoshop, or compress videos, more RAM is often just an incremental upgrade that let’s you keep more programs open.

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There are different kinds of security. You’re talking about the sort that requires the user to do something dumb. There is also the possibility of there just being some sort of exploit available on your OS (with XP and the lack of updates i’m sure this is a thing) which means that you can much more easily be infected even if you’re really smart and savvy and don’t do any of the stupid things that often cause those really annoying viruses that are really obvious.

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And they ditched a lot of backward compatibility with 7 as well.

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No memory pressure - the reason i maintain this machine is the beautiful HD screen i paid extra for and the superdrive - I routinely make iDVDs of the kids for the extended family (hence my need to upgrade my HD). I have tons of photos and music and videos. That is the main reason I haven’t moved to iPad. I don’t want to lose access to my stuff and i don’t want to put 500 GB in the cloud. Why can’t an iPad access my Time Capsule? If apple made a keyboard dock for an iPad that made it a screen for OS X when docked, that would be awesome.

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Or maybe it’s because they don’t make keyboards like they used to?

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