Why are PC sales declining ? (Skybuck thoughts on it too)

Robert Wessel wrote:



If you're using Windows, the "Pro" versions of Vista/Win7/Win8 allow
you to use XP Mode, which is a canned 32-bit XP VM, for both 32 and 64
bit versions of the OS. You can do the same thing with a bit more
effort on other systems.

I don't think WinXP Mode works on Windows 8.

Windows 8 blacklists Windows Virtual PC, so you can't install it.
(Well, you can install it, but you get a dialog when you go to run it.)
I doubt you can install VPC2007 either. On Windows 8, the available
Microsoft solution is Hyper-V, and that won't install without SLAT (EPT).
(Hyper-V was included on my copy of Windows 8, but it refused to install.)
And even if you install Hyper-V, chances are the WinXP Mode VM won't
run there.

WinXP Mode works in Windows 7. At least we know that works.

And it didn't have to be done that way. Someone at
Microsoft was overly clever. I wish I could figure
out their thinking sometimes. (It reminds me of a few
articles recently, where the article authors dreamed that
Microsoft cared what customers thought. Hilarious. What
comes out of Microsoft, in terms of feature set, is
pure "corporate randomness". Opposing forces within
the company crunch together, and the waste products
of the collision, are what we buy.)

Paul

On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 8:28:35 AM UTC-7, ToolPackinMama wrote:

Any of you like Windows 8? I feel zero urge to install it.

I had trouble with it during the first 3 hours but
then realized my desktop machine didn't have a
touch screen.

On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:28:35 -0400, ToolPackinMama wrote:

| Any of you like Windows 8? I feel zero urge to install it.

I definitely didn't like Win8 when I tried the advance version M$ made available for
download before the official release date. But I spent a little more time with it
later and found I could tweak it one way or another including installation of Classic
Shell to make it look and behave pretty much the way I was used to with XP. It is
faster than XP, though. I now have 8 installed on 2 desktops and am completely happy
with it. But I probably would have stuck with XP if I hadn't been able to get 8
Premium for $40 a pop (one downloaded from M$ and one hard copy from Newegg).

For anybody running Win7, especially premium or above, it's probably not a worthwhile
upgrade.

Larc

ToolPackinMama wrote:
Any of you like Windows 8? I feel zero urge to install it.

The problem is, "like" is too strong a word.

It's operating status here, is it's about as
useful as one of my Linux LiveCDs, and used about
as often. No Microsoft account. Never been in the App Store.
Oh my.

I used ClassicShell on the Preview versions, but for
the actual bought version, it remains in pristine glory,
warts and all.

Paul

Very interesting thread hard drives and their attempts at error
correction.

I had a Hard drive with Win7Pro that absolutely would not image - either
with the native Win7 image backup or with Acronis. The backup process would
error out at the same percentage completion place every time. have since
put in an SSD for the OS and formatted the suspected old HD. My only
thought that I could not confirm was that I had bad sector(s) that the
backup programs refused to back up. Am currently using the old suspect HD
for date and doing file backups as the spirit moves me.

Based on this thread, is this the reason for my failed image backups?

Tom

"Dave Platt" wrote in message news
In article , rickman wrote:

Most SSD's have such an algorithm and more. What it does is detect
errors, and reassign alternate blocks in its place. When access time
to any block on the drive is the same, such a system makes good sense.

Do they do that with rotating media? I have a problem with my laptop
where it occasionally looks like it is locked up. If I wait long enough
it returns. Usually it is one or two programs that stop, but if I try
to use other programs they can all end up halted. Eventually it returns
to normal operation. The cause seems to be a disk access that ties up
the interface without moving much data as indicated by the Resource
Monitor. The blue line maxes hard at 100% with a low erratic data rate.
When I looked up what the blue line is, it appears to be the disk
interface usage. This says to me the drive it trying to read a sector
which is bad and continues to reread it for some time before it either
gets the data correctly or finally fails.

Yes, hard drives do try to "spare out" bad sectors when they can.

In general, if the drive has trouble reading a sector (has to make
multiple retries to get bits good enough for the Reed-Solomon error
correction to work) it flags the sector as "pending reassignment".
The next time you write data to the sector, the drive will (typically)
write it and read-confirm it, and repeat this several times. If it
writes OK each time (i.e. each write results in an easily-readable
sector with a low bit error rate) then the sector is taken out of
"pending reassignment" status.

Otherwise, the drive writes the data into a spare sector nearby (some
spares are reserved in each zone of the platter), and updates some
nonvolatile admin information to say "Hey, the data address for sector
#NNNNNN is actually in spare #QQQQQQ." From that point on, all reads
and writes to the flawed-out sector will be diverted to the spare (at
the cost of an additional seek or two).

High-level "disk management" software will sometimes try to stimulate
this process by reading through the whole disk, looking for delays
during reading, and writing the delayed data back in-place (assuming
it read correctly). This can "push" your data from the failing
sectors to the spares, and make it easier to access.

That being said... if a drive gets to the point of having to reassign
sectors in this fashion more than *very* occasionally, you should
replace it. Soon. In my experience, a drive which has enough
internal damage, degradation, or contamination to start losing sectors
more than once every few months is going to die fairly rapidly, and
cannot be trusted. It sounds as if your drive has reached that point.

If you have a S.M.A.R.T. readout program you can retrieve the health
information from the drive, and look at the "reassigned sector" and
"pending reassignment" counters. On a good drive these really should
be zero.

On each of my systems, I run a S.M.A.R.T. readout every day or so, and
a full surface scan about once a week. Doing so has saved me from
serious trouble... I got an indication that some sectors were becoming
unreadable well before the drive really went south, and was able to
order and install a replacement in time.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:26:59 +0100, Tom Del Rosso
wrote:


Skybuck Flying wrote:
Hello,

I was just on the Sega/Company of Heroes Beta feedback forum and I
wondered and thought this is a good question for usenet people !
:
Question is: why are PC sales declining ?:

1. Lack of demanding games ? (probably not)
2. Lack of good games ? (maybe)
3. Windows 8 sucks ? (bad reason, can use windows 7 as alternative)
4. Sick of overheat and associated problems ? (maybe... I am surely
sick of it )
5. Mobile/phones/tablets (I dont believe that... PC/laptop still
better for many tasks... though some decline is to be expected)

Me thinks: Perhaps 2 and 4 is cause of decline.

What are your thoughts on the decline ?


This is an intelligent post. Who are you? Where is Skybuck? What have
you
done with him?


Sort of. It's xposted to next Wednesday and back.


--
It's a money /life balance.

Somewhere on teh intarwebs Jeff Liebermann wrote:
[...]
I'm still using PIII machines for weather stations and data loggers.
The main attraction is low power consumption. I could do better with
a modern SBC, but I already had the working machines.

I have a bunch of old IBM ThinkPads equipped with Pentium M CPUs that use
very little power yet are powerful - preferably R40/51s, they're quite
common, cheap and reliable.

(Use R52s if you want to load up on RAM as they use DDR2, much cheaper than
the former's DDR. The T-series are thin'n'light and, as such more prone to
failure with age. Either due to planar flexing or due to the fans being so
thin / hi-revving.)

Just my 2c. I have a Compaq SFF desktop that uses a PIII 1.13GHz Tualatin
(2GB RAM) and I'm amazed at how slow it is compared to one of the
above-mentioned ThinkPads. So much so that it's due to go to the dump as
it's worth next-to-nothing. I've not even had takers when I offered it
free - except for people who wanted to rob the RAM and sell it on ebay. I
can do that, I'd just rather see it getting used. shrug
--
/Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)