Windows, wind up or what? - Mike Smith
I may have said before in these pages that the people at Apple make me want to vomit with their evangelistic nonsense and their corporate crap. The grandstanding, Nehru-jacketed S. Jobs is just more poorly dressed Hollywood hokum in my view. That they produce some quite nice, fairly user-friendly devices that I can earn my living with is O.K. for me and tens of thousands of others. I don’t have to like the people who make these machines. I don’t; I don’t even have to respect them. What respect I had was dissipated by their inability to provide an adequate let alone comprehensive back-up service causing me aeons of wasted time and humungus ‘phone bills. Believe me, the time spent waiting for a moron in a big company to get his or her act together and fix a problem puts the discussion about the relative speeds of SCSI or USB into perspective.

What does it matter that my computer can access data through a backside cache of 1mb and a CPU described as ‘Blindingly Fast’ when it takes three months and several increasingly irate phone calls to get any action when the hard disk decides to lock itself up and withdraw write priveleges seemingly on a whim? No, make no mistake there is no love lost between myself and Apple. I have , however had an interesting insight over the last few weeks. Well, interesting to me at any rate. 

Because the machine had to run an especially written programme for the motor trade the machine had to be a PC. Having had very little experience of Windows-equipped machines the thought of installing a system for a friend who runs a garage didn’t cause me any sleepless nights whatsoever. I cruised the ads and ended up having decided on a system that while not the cheapest was certainly not the most expensive. Around £900 +VAT bought a machine which at 333mgHz seemed adequate, a 2Gb hard disk was plenty for the type of usage this unit would get. It also came with a printer and a 56kb/s modem. So far so good. The merchant I chose to provide this system was/is local and known to several friends: important for service should anything go wrong. Mission critical, they probably call it at Apple. I asked for the machine without software because my friend had bought Windows already and saw little reason to duplicate the purchase. Yes, I know that Windows is often sold as part of the package, this time it wasn’t .I asked for a boot-disk so I could access the CD driver to mount the Windows CD. (No starting up with the ‘C’ key pressed in Wintel-world). I got it but I didn’t get it if you understand. If you do understand then please explain it to me. To cut a long story short, and I do mean long, nothing worked and I couldn’t get into the machine to install the software so I could find out what was wrong. 

Eventually I took the machine back to the dealer with my Windows number and asked them to install the software, which they did. After trying to charge me for this ‘service’ [I figured the machine should have been accessible to a mere customer]. I got it back and went ahead installing an Office package and an Internet solution from Freeserve. Boy! Was that a mistake? Starting up became a matter of repeatedly pressing any key when the boot process stopped and the machine telling me that an unspecified file wasn’t available for a programme also unnamed that might need it. Well what’s all that about? It turned out that I had to edit something or other in the registry. You don’t want to know about that, it is the most ridiculously opaque load of nonsense I’ve seen and another nightmare which failed to be solved by a friend who actually road tested Windows before it was released to folk like me and knows more about it than, well, someone who knows alot. He eventually reformatted the Hard Disc and I re-installed everything. He said that THIS WAS NORMAL WITH WINDOWS, stuff like this was always happening. It had driven him to buy a new G3 which he likes. He’s a clever boy.

I’m now waiting for the next horror story to occur. And that’s what I wanted to share with you. Apple may drive you mad with the lack of care or service after the Big Purchase; Steve Jobs may look like a jerk and sound like a prat but there’s one thing you never get with Apple and that’s Windows.
Mike Smith