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^ Tea does not remember 1998. There were web site designs as bad as ... well, OK ... maybe not as bad as this one, but very, very bad. They didn't last long. Seriously Paugie, this is fair-dinkum the worst bit of website programming I can remember. It is quite astonishing! It is also amazingly...

What sort of site, Paugie? Static? Dynamic? What sort of stuff? (The right answer for you will be different depending on your data types.) Maybe the easiest might be to post the URL (or PM it to me if you don't want to do that) and we can figure it out from there.

Um, how so? There is Classic Shell (which is on practically everything). Then there is Start8 (which is on practically everything else). And they BOTH work just like Windows 7 (or if you are using Classic Shell, optionally other Windows versions you know even better). PS: there are some...

By the way, Microsoft just lost one billion dollars by making way too many unsalable Windows 8 tablets they couldn't sell. This Register article is worthwhile: Surface RT: A plan worthy of the South Park Underpants Gnomes -...

^ this is just wrong. Completely wrong. What is so hard about saying "click START -> PROGRAMS -> (whatever)"? You've already been doing it for 18 years. My guess is that you're pretty good at it. The shell replacements exist because they are easier to use. They make your job easier. They are...

Edit: hmmmm ... there is clearly something scewy with the site software. That's the second time in a week it has made a double post all by itself.

4DOS Yep, it's been that long. Also GEM. Oh, and, of course, there was that other one, Winsomething. It was a replacement shell for the standard operating system of the day, which was called PC-DOS. Bill somebody (can't remember his other name) made a lot of money out of it 'cause it was...

I'm actually selling more machines now than I have for a while. Paradoxically, this is because of Windows 8! The industry as a whole is suffering terribly from the triple impact of (a) the switch to tablets and telephones and set top boxes instead of computers (b) the hardware plateau - a...

I know where you are coming from Mark, but I think your analogy is quite wrong. It is in fact like hiring someone to service your car and having it come back washed, polished, and vacuumed inside. (Come to think of it I do that also, sort of - give the machine a wipe over outside if it looks...

Not at all Mark. A client is entitled to a reasonable expectation that I will provide him with a positive overall experience. Improving his UI is absolutely part of my job, and a particularly important part where the default UI is poor. I have yet to meet one single customer running Win 8 who...

I only ever see Classic Shell and, now and again, Start8. Classic Shell is the standard. But it wouldn't matter if I saw dozens of them, 'cause they are all designed to be simple, intuitive, and familiar to anyone who has ever used Windows. Where is the problem? I'm just not seeing it and...

Pfft! I do know how to get around in Windows 8. It is dead easy to work on Win 8. It takes ~30 seconds to install Classic Shell. Once that is on, you can work on it pretty much as usual. Windows 8 + Classic Shell is easier to use and work on than Vista or Windows 7. And you would be wrong...

This is powerful evidence in favour of Liam's point. When public rejection of a "feature" is really strong, people find ways around it; major OEMs (if they are smart) find ways to dodge the toxic bullet. When MS inflicted Vista on the world, Lenovo sold literally millions of systems with...

dp

But they DO have a choice, and they exercise it. Often. People have walked away from the borked ribbonised MS Office in their millions. Once upon a time, MS Office was on practically every computer you ever saw. It was so universally successful that lots and lots of users thought Word and Excel...

Correct! The number of people who have switched to Open Office since MS borked it with Office 2007 is mind-blowing. Their Office 97 or 2000 or 2003 runs out ('cause they lost the disc or 'cause they need something compatible with newer file formats, or it's an OEM one and non-transferrable to a...

Huh? No idea what you are talking about. You can never find anything. Even the underlying never-ever-break conventions are borked - try pressing F1 in Office 2007. It does nothing. F1 is always the help key. Every single time. No exceptions. Ever.

Absolutely disagree with this nonsense. Every single training and efficiency expert on the planet will tell you that the key to efficient, productive performance of any task is familiarity. The control for any given action should always be in the same place. Always. Every single time. There are...

It was, and still would be if Microsoft cared to actually address the problem instead of pulling an incredibly stupid trick on their customers. When customers say that they want a start button, they mean a real one, one that does the things they expect a start button to do in something roughly...

But Seagate is Samsung. At least that's my understanding: when Seagate bought the Samsung hard drive division, they also agreed to buy vast amounts of Samsung flash RAM for making SSDs, and Seagate-badged SSDs are really Samsung. Or so I heard, Perhaps I have it wrong.

Cheers all. I'll leave the SSD go for the time being. I'm running Seagate hybrid drives so I get better than mechanical drive performance already. I'll revisit the SSD theory a few years down the track when I'm no longer happy with the performance I'm getting. Right now, I'm mainly just...

They have actually been quite good these last few years - which, as Mubs says, is why I don't mind selling them. Up until the Core 2 series, Intel's CPUs were way, way off the pace. Much more money for much less performance - all the way through from the Pentium II to the end of the Pentium IV...

Cheers lads. I had to look mSATA up, although I vaguely knew that there was an extra slot you could put some sort of SSD into - must have read that on the Thinkpad forums somewhere. The mSATA drives look horribly expensive and much too small for me. A quick look at a wholesaler gives me the...

So long as it's still more-or-less within spec, Tim, you should be fine. In general, if a PSU boots reliably it will run reliably. (But you never really know for certain, of course.)

They arrived! No idea why they were so cheap. These are T530s with a mid-range CPU (yes it's an i7 but only a 3520M which is apparently Ivy Bridge and not as nice as the newest ones) and a 1600 x 900 screen - not as good a screen quality as I'd like, but much better than a lot of so-called...

Why the change? Simply, 'cause my favourite wholesaler carries the Intel parts in stock and has to order the AMD in just for me. They are very organised and very quick so I still get fast delivery whichever one I ask for, but it's easier for them to sell the one they have in stock. They are...

My wholesaler claims to have, in stock, a few dozen Thinkpad T530s with 500GB, the middling screen (1600x 900), and a mid-range i7 processor for under a grand. So I ordered three of them. Order seems to be stuck in never-never land. I suspect that they don't want to sell them to me after all.

Sigh. All I wanted was to look for a missing JPG file which wasn't present in its proper folder. Where the bloody hell was the navigation tree so that I could select a suitable start point (such as one of my hard drives)? Unbelievably bad! All I could see was that asinine bloody ribbon thing...

OMG! I just used the search function in Win 8 for the first time. Vomitsville! The interface is so bad that I honestly do not believe it. I mean, for the love of Mike, the user interface for searching was something Microsoft got pretty much right with Windows 95! How hard can it be to do...

So what you are saying, Chewy, is that Win 8 Metro is a good, simple, practical interface for computer morons. (No criticism of your dad there at all - any beginner to any area as large, diverse and complex as desktop computing is always going to be on that sort of level.) Point is, there...

I started this thread with quite a lot to say and by the time I got down to here I had absolutely nothing left to add to this thread 'cause Merc's first post covered the lot! Can't say I care for ASUS much. Care for HP even less, though I have seen some quite solid-seeming HP corporate...

PS: the way it comes straight out of the box isn't bad, though I do have a few tweaks I like to add.

I've never thought about that, Dave. Hell, two machines counts as a "large deployment" in my book, and it's easier just to point and click for a few minutes. Saves thought. Anything that saves thought is a good thing. But assuming Classic Shell has some sort of config file you can copy to a...

Good news! The best-of-breed Windows 8 UI fix package, Classic Shell, has now been updated to include the one key feature that it was missing - disable start menu transparency. It is very difficult to disable the deliberate cripple of the start menu Microsoft introduced with Windows 8 yourself...

Cheers Doug. Makes sense to me, Merc. My needs are sort of a mirror image of yours. I never need the full power of a big desktop, but would seldom be satisfied with a keyboardless tablet-style unit. Well, I could use one to read the news, but I already need a notebook or desktop to do other...

But that's just the thing: this is what people review and it is what people buy, and not just on a right-sort-of-cardboard level either: people buy Apple products because they like the packaging. They neither know nor care about the technical quality of what's inside the cardboard box, let alone...

Just so. I came to the same realisation a while back. Now, whenever I need to scan something (about twice a year, maybe, typically a document I have to sign and email or post) I just take a photograph and send that instead. Easy.

Hmmmm ... I am very suspicious of "independent" groups. Remember all these "independent" CPU benchmarks Intel owned by devious, hidden methods? But be that as it may, any "test" that rates Norton AV above products like ... well, above practically anything really ... isn't a test, it's a PR scam...

Sounds as though you are on your way, RW, Most of what you learn in this field you learn by just mucking in and trying to figure stuff out, one step at a time (same as life, really!) using the resources you can find on-line and it looks as though you are heading in the right direction there...

Speaking of nutcase politicians with technical knowledge inferior to that of very flat roadkill, this Register article is to the point: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/04/abbott_raises_cost_bogeyman/

We have them too Merc. Hell, the Leader of the Opposition - virtually certain to win the election in September - is one. He cleverly cloaks it and pretends to be taking his medication, but every now and then his real beliefs slip out. And some of his sidekicks are downright loopy. Not as...

Cheers, Lunar. There is a weird sort of symmetry here: USA: have DSL, talking about upgrading fibre optic cable Australia: have fibre optic cable (part installed), talking about "upgrading" to DSL. Sigh. Do you want some backward-looking, monumentally ignorant loudmouth politicians with not...

^ They'll probably think we made it all up. It must be just fiction. :eek: You wouldn't really get a whole first-world country with a telecommunications network as throughly borked as the one we just described. Would you? :) Oh no, wait. I just remembered the US health-care system. Perhaps...

Finally, Telstra service standards. You know, ever since they got rid of the appallingly bad Sol Trujillo and put the soft-spoken, effective David Thodey in charge instead, Telstra has improved. Improved out of sight. I'm not saying they are perfect, 'cause they certainly ain't, but David...

Cross-posted again, I'm afraid, but this should cover it. The Liberals' "plan" is not just vastly slower, it is also not any cheaper, certainly not cheaper over even the medium term. The Liberals "plan" to retain the ancient copper network as well as modern fibre, and they need both because...

Cheers Chewy. Forgive me while I cross-post something I wrote elsewhere a year or so ago. It's still pretty relevant. 1: What does the NBN entail? Essentially, there are two main aspects to the NBN. (1) Replacement of the ancient copper wires running down our streets with modern fibre...

This is not actually true. When Telstra (then called Telecom, and before that known as the PMG) was a government department, they had their issues and their service could be pretty bad, but they were world technology leaders who pioneered things like long-distance microwave trunks and, most...

Quite right, Lunar. I trialled Start8 and it looks slick, but Classic Shell is much, much better overall. In a perfect world, we could have the functionality of Classic Shell married to the high-quality visual finish of Start8.

I just switched the office over from Neighborhood Cable/Transact (HFC Internet) and the local Community Telco (rebranded Telstra copper phone line) to ADSL2 and a bundled phone line with Internode, Chewy. I was paying $100 for 25GB and $30 for the line rental. (I need a real phone line for the...

Correct! I am the living proof of it. It might surprise you to learn this, but I used to feel bad and look like crap until I turned 40. Since then, of course, I have got better in every way.