Today was another of those “machines are out to get me” days. You know, you buy a nice, shiny new multi-function device and then have to spend all day trying to get the software to load so that it will work properly.
Maybe it’s me, but if they say it will work with your operating system, shouldn’t it work with your operating system? None of the machines would even recognise the disc properly! Ended up having to use a laptop that was running a different OS to copy the contents of the disc across to the machine that needed to have the software loaded, and then run it from the hard-drive.
I hate the way that we have to rely on machines to get anything done these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love gadgets (I have to, I’m male - it’s the law) and I love tinkering with them; but that’s when I don’t have to rely on them. I can re-format my laptop anytime I want without losing anything important, so I can play about with it to my heart’s content. But I can’t re-format my work PC anytime I want because it takes up too much time and I can’t afford to risk losing any important data. So, I want my work PC to be reliable, but today has further proved to me that’s just not possible.
The PC I use is several years old and has had software added and taken off across that time, but to my mind the OS should be able to deal with that. Yet, you read all over the ‘Net that if you’re not reformatting your drive every six months or so, you’re just going to end up with a PC that grinds to a halt. Well, mine is definitely grinding.
But I’m not sure that a new PC would help. For a start, I’d have to make sure it didn’t come with Vista, as I know that several of our peripherals will not work with it (the manufacturers are not producing Vista drivers, because of the age of the machinery); then you’ve still got all the same issues with XP - if not more, because of all the security holes, etc. I know from experience with my laptop that loading all the MS updates can cause untold problems (it’s taken me about a year to identify why my laptop kept locking up, due to a file that got updated in SP2).
So, all-in-all, I’d quite like to go back to a mechanical typewriter please.
