A day at the office

[plinden]

So, I was in a meeting this morning, where I was going to give a quick presentation (nothing important). Only, I forgot that my Dell D810 (less than 1 year old) has a small problem where, if I disconnect the external monitor while it's awake, the keyboard buffer gets screwed up in some way and the PC thinks the shift key is being held down.

This makes it pretty hard to give a PowerPoint presentation.

This has happened before, and the only way I can find to fix it is to reboot. Except, the Dell takes 6-8 minutes to reboot from when I press Restart to when I can use it. (It also has a few other small problems, like the noisy fans, heat, whine and backlight bleeding along the bottom of the screen).

This gave my colleague a chance to use the projector using his D810. He opened his Word document which promptly froze. After a couple of minutes the "this application has stopped responding" dialog popped up, but no matter how often he pressed "End now", although the dialog would disappear, Word would not quit and the dialog would reappear. He couldn't even kill it in Task Manager.

That's when a third guy at the meeting said, "you'll just have to reboot. That's what I have to do when Word freezes on me".

Now, the thing that struck me wasn't that these were three defective computers (with a couple of hundred employees and a couple of hundred PCs, the chances are fairly high that three of us with problem PCs would get together some time) but that we treated all this as part of our daily routine. None of have asked the IT department to take a look at them, rather accepting that this is part of what you have to go through if you use Windows PCs at work.

Hmm, that's it really. No real point to this, which is why it's in Community Discussion.

 

[Unorthodox]

Thats the thing I hated most about Windows....
When one thing goes bad more times than not, that means a reboot.
Goodbye unsaved changes!
Goodbye 5-8 minutes of my life!

 

[andiwm2003]

i have seen exactly that happen in our company meeting 157 times. or more often. and everybody just accepts it as god given reality. it's just sad. really, in my experience in one out of two cases there are problems when they start presentations. it's either connecting to the network, using the beamer, switching the display to the beamer, starting power point or excel. it only works with IBM Thinkpads or when the Bioinformatics guys use their LINUX machines.

when i give sometimes presentations with my powerbook and i walk up to the beamer, plug the cable in and click detect displays and everything works like a charm people say mac's are crap and crash all the times.

 

[macartistkel]

Yeah, I understand about the whole waiting for a PC to boot up and dealing with the stupid error messages. It is beyond ridiculous. I go to my parents house and turn on the computer...wait like 10 minutes for the thing to stop churning before I am able to pull up the browser and look at a web page.

 

[dsnort]

I spent all day at a trade show with my boss and his two week old Thinkpad. Took me and him together 15 minutes to find bluetooth on it, and never was able to get it to work right.

The convention center has a wifi setup on a pay as you go basis. His Thinkpad couldn't find it. All it could see was the comp to comp network of the exhibitors a couple of booths over. He needed to send an email badly, so I outed my Macbook and fires it up. Within two minutes it had id'd 3 different networks, including the one we wanted.

Of course, he still thinks my Mac is a "toy".

 

[Sesshi]

Well yesterday I was like writing this review on the MacBook Pro and it was suddenly like this curtain came down over the primary monitor and like I saw this thing with the on switch. I, like, had no choice but to restart the system.
And like the whole of my review was gone. And I was like...
The Mac devoured my review.
It was a really good review.
And I have to like write it like again but fast so it's not going to be as good.
It's kind of... a bummer.

 

[rdowns]

My company was acquired by a private equity firm about 6 months ago. Had to do a presentation last week as we prepare our 2007 budgets and plans. 2 of the 4 in front of me had problems with their laptops. I popped my iBook out of its sleeve and plugged into the large plasma we use in the board room and ran throught my slides without a problem.

The CEO asked if that was the Sony VAIO they bought me 2 months ago. I said no, it's my Mac. He asked why and I replied, I just chose the best tool to get the job done.

If they had only listened and allowed me to buy the MPB I wanted.

 

[iSaint]

I have several stories of classmates' Windows PCs freezing up and crashing during school presentations. So far my Mac has been flawless.

 

[plinden]

Well yesterday I was like writing this review on the MacBook Pro and it was suddenly like this curtain came down over the primary monitor and like I saw this thing with the on switch. I, like, had no choice but to restart the system.
And like the whole of my review was gone. And I was like...
The Mac devoured my review.

You mean, you got a kernel panic. All the usual questions apply ... and you may find this informative - http://thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

Yeah, it happens to Macs too. Last year a friend of my wife was in the market for a new laptop, was thinking about a PowerBook, but was put off by someone having a problem giving a presentation using a Mac. So she got a Dell XPS laptop instead ... one of those with the blue LEDs.

The point is, people will see this happen once with a Mac, say it's a piece of crap and buy a PC, but will see it happen twenty times on a PC and still buy a PC.

As for my own particular case, I'm pretty experienced with PCs (I've owned or had possession of 10 or more in the past decade, including Dells and IBMs - this one is the worst POS since my Compaq Armada in 1999, and that was a POS because I spilled a cup of coffee over it), and I've tried all the usual fixes to speed up shutdown and startup but it doesn't do any good.

 

[pianoman]

It's a shame that people live like that (and yes, it has become a way of life for many). You should tell that story to your IT guys and explain how Macs could prevent it. Or just convince them to buy a Mac for your use.

Also noteworthy is that Keynote is better than PowerPoint.

 

[Sesshi]

You mean, you got a kernel panic. All the usual questions apply ... and you may find this informative - http://thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

Yeah, it happens to Macs too. Last year a friend of my wife was in the market for a new laptop, was thinking about a PowerBook, but was put off by someone having a problem giving a presentation using a Mac. So she got a Dell XPS laptop instead ... one of those with the blue LEDs.

The point is, people will see this happen once with a Mac, say it's a piece of crap and buy a PC, but will see it happen twenty times on a PC and still buy a PC.

As for my own particular case, I'm pretty experienced with PCs (I've owned or had possession of 10 or more in the past decade, including Dells and IBMs - this one is the worst POS since my Compaq Armada in 1999, and that was a POS because I spilled a cup of coffee over it), and I've tried all the usual fixes to speed up shutdown and startup but it doesn't do any good.

This was on a Mac fresh back from repair, installed from the ground up, working on a file. I'm not actually going to blame OS X for this - I'll blame the POS that is the Macbook Pro and Applecare, especially as it's not actually fully repaired of all the issues I sent it in for and I am sure still harbours some cooling issues. I have to say this is also the very first time ever that I have sent in a laptop for warping, and I don't mean in a Star Trek sense.

Dunno. I'm pretty experienced too and most of the times I've come across people who say Windows sucks is that they don't actually know how it works, even if they say and think that they have a clue. Granted, it's certainly not as effective as OS X but I find it very stable in everyday use - more than I've found OS X on 6 regularly used Macs I have to say.