The Thousand Injuries of Fortunato

Discussion in 'Member Casual Chat' started by Grey Matter, Jul 23, 2022.

  1. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2020
    Messages:
    4,401
    Likes Received:
    2,579
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Hey Redmond: If I wanted a Mac, I'd get a Mac.

    It's kinda like if I were a wood craftsman and had worked on years setting up my shop, I walk into it one day to find that it wasn't my shop at all! Nope, it belonged to the Wood Workers Guild and I was but a pawn in the organization.

    They decided for me that table saw was too fancy and removed the controls for setting the blade height and tilt as well as permanently welded the blade in place, for safety reasons.

    Next on their list was my router and lathe, both of which were destined for similar upgrades.

    And All of my hand tools were confiscated and some ungodly type of vacuum removed all the years of sawdust and aromas from it that gave me such great personal pleasure in having everything where I wanted it.

    Windows is kinda like this little analogy for me. I've spent the vast majority of my life sitting in front of a Windows desktop and doing stuff in Excel, Access, Word and Visio. Pdf files, lord the amount of content I depend upon wrapped in Pdf files. API Standards and Recommended Practices, NFPA Standards, ANSI Standards, ASME Standards, UL Standards, Allen-Bradley Manuals, Honeywell Manuals, Bently-Nevada Manuals. 2000 hours a year minimum since 1995 I've been crunching through this information all to build xls, doc and vsd files with content to specify hardware and software to run and maintain petrochemical plant control systems.

    But the real fun is converting this stuff into its final form: DCS configuration and graphics and PLC programming. Administrative access to the Windows OS and these applications is essential to be able to make this stuff work.

    I'm now approaching 60,000 hours of work with this OS and I suppose that for the most part I am pleased with my ability to get stuff done with it and its office suite. But the tedious hours and effort I have to spend to beat Redmond's out-of-the-box system into shape to get stuff working the way I want it to, to the diminishing extent it's possible to do so compared to features that have been deprecated for approaching two decades now is nothing but suck.

    It's a shame I wasn't able to invite Gates, Balmer and Nadella down into my catacombs for a flask of Amontillado back in about 2005 when I had my shop setup just the way I liked it.

    Hahaha....Nemo me impune lacessit? Nope: Redmond impune me provocat
     
  2. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2020
    Messages:
    10,342
    Likes Received:
    10,711
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Assume you're coming over from Apple. Is it an improvement?

    But the tedious hours and effort I have to spend to beat Redmond's out-of-the-box system into shape to get stuff working the way I want.

    Can you elaborate what you mean here?

     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2022
  3. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2020
    Messages:
    4,401
    Likes Received:
    2,579
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    You didn't manage to read the whole post apparently if you missed this part of it:

    I'm now approaching 60,000 hours of work with this OS....
     
  4. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2020
    Messages:
    10,342
    Likes Received:
    10,711
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Thanks. It did appear a bit like a post for people in your trade. I didn't want to assume I knew what you meant.
     
    Grey Matter likes this.
  5. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2020
    Messages:
    4,401
    Likes Received:
    2,579
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I first started using windows seriously around September/October 1990.
    At that time it was Version 3.1 and I used that version all the way up until December 1995 when I switched to NT.
    Next came XP and then 7 and then 10 and now 11.
    XP was the sweet spot, but there were some Apps that I ran under 3.1 that were amazing.
    Aldus Freehand was one of them and I became mildly proficient at making drawings in it.
    Word 2.0 was not too bad and it was an interesting transition to it from WordPerfect.
    WordPerfect was a beast to learn, but once you did your fingers never had to leave the keyboard to achieve all sorts of things that absolutely require a mouse now.
    Getting Word 2.0 to do the most of the stuff I wanted from my experience with WordPerfect was not too bad.
    Oh, haha, and then there was a bit of fun I had having to learn Lotus 123 - my first real PC app in the Spring of 1990.
    Man, what an idiot, I thought getting my degree was going to be like the way I coasted through high school, not even close....
    I was pissed off that I had to "memorize" using the forward slash key to Lotus to activate its menu.
    Newb....

    Then as time went by I had some reason to get into the flow of using the OS itself.
    I'd have Quattro Pro, Word and other stuff open with multiple apps running and I found myself getting annoyingly lost.
    So I jacked around with the windows themselves and developed my own little habit of making a menu like arrangement of active apps scrunched down to just the title bar and then I'd arrange all the title bars in a two column grid.
    Maximize and Restore window functions were great at working in one, restoring it to its title bar size and then maximizing the next app I needed to use.
    Never having had a class on Windows I was unaware of freaking Alt-Tab and as soon as I did learn about it my tedious game with the windows sizing was thankfully over.
    But, my use of multiple windows was only just beginning and thanks to digging into the color scheme of the OS I found that I could set the active frame color versus the inactive frame color.
    And then after about a decade I decided that white screens sucked and I got use to using various muted pastel type colors for the primary work area.
    I think I ended up settling on a post-it note shade of yellow for the most part.
    Win 10: No longer an option.
    Win 11: Now I can't put the taskbar over on the right hand side of my right screen where it's been for 20+ years.
    Hence, my rant here just to vent....

    Anyway, I got used to doing a bunch of setups to get the box to where everything was just a single click away.
    Quick Launch rocked!
    Put all my app shortcuts in it and never had to use the start menu again, mostly.

    This new box is probably strong enough to setup an XP VM machine on it, so I'm looking forward to that.
    Microsoft gives away Visual Studio now for free.
    I suppose if I were going to be balanced about my rant here I'd have to give them mad props for that too.

    Apologies for my previous terse response.
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2022
  6. lemmiwinx

    lemmiwinx Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Aug 29, 2016
    Messages:
    8,069
    Likes Received:
    5,428
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    You lost me at writing a grade average chart for my class in Basic. Those were the days my friend.
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2022
    Grey Matter likes this.
  7. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2020
    Messages:
    4,401
    Likes Received:
    2,579
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
  8. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Aug 13, 2020
    Messages:
    10,342
    Likes Received:
    10,711
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Not at all..

    XP was always the most stable for me. Funny that.

    You're obviously power-user. The closest I've come to seriously using multiple screens and windows is when I'm writing papers and I have to quickly access several programs at the same time.

    Here's the thing that confuses me. At the same time programs are getting or more complicated and more demanding on resources, many aspects are also becoming overly simplified and stunted. I'm talking about when they started calling programs "apps". I really can't stand this dumbed version for windows 10. I heard Windows 11 is even worse, which you've aluded to. IMO you should be up with choose to have the legacy PC version and not have to swap between two interfaces, where one fails.
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2022
    Grey Matter likes this.
  9. Adfundum

    Adfundum Moderator Staff Member Donor

    Joined:
    Jul 31, 2018
    Messages:
    7,683
    Likes Received:
    4,171
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    MS-DOS and two 5 1/4" floppies to boot it up. Every program had a disk, and start up took a long time. Then, the lovely sound of the modem logging on to the internet. From the catacombs of my mind...those were the days.

    I still have an old Dell from 2004. It's had pretty much everything upgraded over the years until it's not an old Dell anymore. Now it's going with the others that lacked the hardware for the Windows upgrade. Come, old friend, to the vaults.
     
    Grey Matter likes this.
  10. Grey Matter

    Grey Matter Well-Known Member Donor

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2020
    Messages:
    4,401
    Likes Received:
    2,579
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I reckon I'm a non-native Texan, and there are only a very small number of current things I miss in my hometown, Louavull.
    Fall is easily the greatest one of these, followed closely by lightning bugs in the summer, which for some ungodly reason we don't have in Houston.
    Anyway, I'm not sure if the OS gets the credit for this GE Force RTX 144 Hz desktop, but it's sweet!

    upload_2022-8-8_20-57-33.png
     

Share This Page