Tag: reboot

  • Why I hate Microsoft, part 1,392

    I freely admit that I am a Mac user. OS-X just works better for me, and my workflow.  But I will grant that Windows 7 is pretty good, and usable.

    Of course, since I work in the corporate world, I am forced to use Windows (well, in the past I have been a rebel and was a Mac in a PC world, but I stopped beating my head against that wall).  For the most part, Windows is fine. I even like Office 2010 and the ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007.

    But, for some strange reason, I have glitches in my email. We use Exchange and Outlook for email and calendaring, and it seems about once a week the OST file (where outlook keeps local data) borks. This leads to not being able to send or receive emails until I repair the OST. Which requires me to quit any applications that access the Outlook API and the OST file. Which means that I really have to reboot to scan and fix the errors. And since I have a PGP Whole Disk Encryption, it takes about 30 minutes for the services that hit the disk to be done after a reboot.

    Sigh, so go through all this, and run the tool (3 x until I no longer get errors in the scan), and then I can get back to work.

    Lost hour of productivity, because Outlook decides to freak out.

    Tobe fair, I have had some data issues on my mac, and keep much larger stores of email locally but they are fewer, and recovery doesn’t require running a program that looks like Windows NT3.51 vintage UI (the scanpst.exe program) to recover.

  • Why I hate my Windows PC

    At work, I am blessed with a HP Elitebook 8460p (15 inch wide screen, core i5) laptop. It has OK specs, and I pimped it out to 16 G of ram.

    But it is dog slow. We probably have 2 – 3 updates a week pushed to us that require a reboot. I have to save all my work, and reboot, and then wait. I have learned to open up the resource monitor and watch the disk get hammered.  For about 15 minutes after boot.

    I know that Windows 7 is a lot snappier on similar hardware, but working for a fortune 500 company, with an eye on security, there is a metric shit-ton of stuff that is running including a full disk encryption package.

    I am tempted to drop in a blank drive, install a fresh Win7 install, and see if that performs better. Probably, but it will be for naught, as I will have to go back to the original drive, image and configuration.