PCs are total shite (RANT WARNING)

[grobelaar]

I just want to reiterate a point that I'm sure I've made several times on this forum ...

PCs ARE THE BIGGEST BAG OF FUCKING WANK IN EXISTENCE

I pity anyone who has to part with money to buy one, its bad enough that I have to work with the mediocre lumps of toss, let alone part with hard earned cash...

I've just got into work this afternoon - to be faced with some file in your system is missing or corrupt, please restart with a Windows 2000 set up floppy or CD ROM. Is there one of these in the office - no, can Windows fix itself - no - what a bag o' wank. So now I've got to spend the next 6 hours sat on some piece of shit PC, with some old goldfish bowl monitor and NO MUSIC - mwah, mwah... I want my Macintosh...

For the record, yes I know they are losing out in the speed stakes, but honestly these days, I've decided its something of a moot point, all this speed, what's it for - making us work harder with less breaks - if a render or process takes twice as long on a mac - I'm just going to put the kettle on.

As for the price, thing well you get what you pay for. My Mac at home is 4 years old, never lost a hard drive, never had to reformat or anything - in fact I've never even defragged it (which is bad). If

My PC at work is 2 years old, I've lost two hard drives and now this... Even if they were half the price they are now, I still wouldn't bother. I'm not sure I can express in words how bad I think PCs are on so many fronts.

How they've advocated a new depth of shitty customer service - name one other product or service where you can part with those sort of sums of money and still get something that doesn't actually work - and requires you to spend more money to even get information on how to fix it.

Aaaaaarrrrrghhhh - I hate them, I hate them - why do they have to exist...??? grrrrr...

[tsr_tomas]

what we need is a computha that works... for exemple a .. i can´t think of any computher that works without crashing.

but the c64, i still love !

[Mirsha]

I don't have too much a problem with mine apart from it being horribly under spec and being shit in that way. I've had mines up and running for months at a time without a problem and it's only crashed a few times in three years.

[owain_k]

PCs are the baine of my life......which is most unfortunate as i rely on mine to run my equipment.....the weirdest thing is I can't actually remember a time when its actually worked correctly :(

But, i still mange to make music so it can't be all that bad !

However, the words: mass-produced shoddy wank come to mind when i think of microsoft products :D

[Ruben A]

remember - it´s not the hardware - you wouldn´t be able to see the difference between mac-hardware and pc-hardware!

It´s the fucking operative system!!! SOFTWARE!!!!!

Software sucks in general!

:-p :illin:

[Sheridan]

I agree with you there ruben. macs and pcs are 95 % identical physically. the main reason I don't like PCs is just that I don't like windows. once I started using a mac and learning the os I fell in love. we are getting married nex year. :!

[grunder]

untill there is a piece of editing software that is any good on mac then there is still a need for the dirty old pc..........

soundforge is the only straight up wave editor that allows you to properly get you fingers into the wave.

[Ruben A]

PRO TOOLS!

lol

[arar]

...well Ive got a crudy old pc laptop which I had managed to optimise beautifully under win ME (believe it or not) not one crash in two months..then I stupidily upgraded to XP..this solved one small persistant problem but has been causing crashes once a day now thats what I get...if it aint broke dont fix it...on the other hand you only have to look at the forum on the ableton website to realise that macs bring their own problems...

[grobelaar]

Yeah, yeah - I know its software, PCs are software, whereas Macs are a hardware/software hand-in-glove package...

Apparently my registry has become corrupted - what is this, how does this happen...

The fact remains that people are always going to run into problems with any computer when it comes to installing a using lots of different software, but the fact remains that my PC is fucked, it has nothing to do with any new software or software conflicts (because I haven't installed any), its more fucked that any Mac I've ever had or seen or heard about and the worse is that this is accepted with a certain resignation as if this is just a run of the mill occurance. Our CTO is busy repairing it now - and its scary trip into DOS, set-ups, repair screens etc etc, certainly not just a case of sticking the OS disc and at worse having to reinstall the OS, and running with extensions set to OS Base, until you figure out where the conflict is.

Sorry, I know its all down to personal opinion, but this alone just justifies all my reason for not rating PCs... macs have their limits and problems - but they don't include leaving you fucked like someone stranded on the motorway, waiting for some mechanic to drive out and do that funny blowing noise and say "its gonna cost yer"

[phil]

I have a pc and a mac. i use the mac for video stuff and music and the pc for 3d and stuff.

[invisibleplanet]

your registry is the master directory - it holds the keys to all your s/w and h/w operations...

u can sort your registry out with a registry editor - i'm told they're very good. i'll ask my engineer, and see which package is the best (free).#

over time, your pc will have had s/w and peripherals installed and deleted, and with windows, unless u use the given prog remover, your registry remains littered with keys and paths which go nowhere....this is how most conflicts begin..


one quick overview can be made by start>run>regedit - now look closely at your HKEY LOCAL MACHINE .

expand the software folder....is everything here listed actually still installed on your machine? if you have more here, than is actually installed, this would be a good indicator that ur pc has had enough of being mislead!

ok...registry editing is not for the uninitated..so read up about it!
i've been running a pc for years and never had to format c. or deinstall/reinstall progs, like some MAC users i know
and a defrag of any Hard Drives u have would be a good idea - daily with a pc i recommend.

[platinumray]

xp is a fucking nightmare. my pc crashes all the time and it can't handle having more than a few programmes installed on it at any one time. i have to re-install and remove things constantly. i'm sure this is because of xp, i never had this problem with 98. also those fuckers at dell decided to put the cd volume control though the wav control which is niggingly annoying but not enough to sent it back. plus, the head phone output doesn't work. if you search in help for anything in xp forget about it.

[dirtyho]

Start Menu, Run, then type regedit
this loads the built in windows registry editor
[caveat] if you don't know what you're doing with this - dont use it!

[invisibleplanet]

originally by philI have a pc and a mac. i use the mac for video stuff and music and the pc for 3d and stuff.



i was thinking of getting a mac eventually for design...but i think they're very expensive, and i'm poor, so i'll have to earn/save up for one.

I do like OSX, and i love the 'sensitive response' with a friend's mac...the minimal mouse movement really impresses me..i'm sure my pc mouse/machine isn't as sensitive, but i really need this sensitivity for freehand.

i don't think it matters which computer tool u use at the end of the day. having a mac doesn't make a better creator of you...that comes from the spark within.

of course, it's been a bummer that mac users get the creative s/w b4 pc's...but things are changing ...

[dirtyho]

I've got two PC's and they're fine (win 2000 pro)
But if I had the money I'd buy a Mac
Especially for video, QT rocks

[phil]

os x is good. i really like how stable it is. my mac has never got broken. I had trouble with my pc the other day, silly me accidently dragged double clicked on all the icons on my desktop, i had real problems..not even a blue screen the computer just turned itself off and when i turned it back on it said on the screen that my book club was damaged. So i had to use my four..yes four start up disks and then it worked...

[invisibleplanet]

Originally posted by platinumray
xp is a fucking nightmare. my pc crashes all the time and it can't handle having more than a few programmes installed on it at any one time. i have to re-install and remove things constantly. i'm sure this is because of xp, i never had this problem with 98. also those fuckers at dell decided to put the cd volume control though the wav control which is niggingly annoying but not enough to sent it back. plus, the head phone output doesn't work. if you search in help for anything in xp forget about it.

i'musing xp - and have had no problems with this at all!

tip! removing and reinstalling is likely to be more of a waste of your time than u realise! use only as a last resort...this is because nothing is really deleted from your drive...just corrupted and compressed so it can't be read anymore....so...

try another approach. get a registry editor, and use it to clean up your keys...

defrag all the drives on your machine....installing deinstalling creates enormous fragmentation of your drive...this won't help the pc look for data it needs, and can be responsible for a crash.

if u still have probs with XP after trying these housekeeping excercises, then perhaps u need to look at memory allocations >control panel>system>advanced>performance>advanced>

if u still have probs...then say..i'm sure one of the geeks here can help!

[dirtyho]

That's exactly windows problem phil
It's that "pain in the arse" factor which is hard to avoid as a windows novice. If you know what you're doing with windows it's fine.
But if you dont....
The amount of people I know who have broken their pc by deleting "Program Files" or some other madness is scary.
Apple novices just open photoshop everyday and off they go.

[phil]

on a related note, i knocked my cup of tea off my monitor shelf and it landed on the keyboard. obviously it made a mess and i had to take the keys out to mop it down, but now for some reason my hot keys like CTRL & C and CTRL & V etc don't work.. does anyone know why this happened, do i have to buy a new keyboard?

[pille'ocheoni]

ehhhh.....yeah problems everywhere.................giv e me a solution and i might consider something differnt

[invisibleplanet]

left or right ctrlkey ? or both?

[phil]

I beg your pardon?

[phil]

the ctrl key i think works? but i am unsure.. but none seem to work with c or v... maybe i should see if my ctrl keys are working and go from there. but its strange they are both broken. i mean whats the chances of just those 2 keys being fucked?

[bitch one]

personally i advocate doing a clean install of windows every now and again. pain in the arse, but worth it, especially if (like me) you get greedy and install loads of dodgy software to try it out and only end up using a few progs. then after your clean install use norton ghost - every time you are about to install something you make a ghost copy of your system onto another drive/partition - then if it becomes untable you just copy the ghost over your system partition and you're back where you started. only trouble is you have to be slightly organised to do this, ahem. and i always forget.

to me using computers for making music is kind of a battle, sometimes i wish i'd just learned to play guitar. guitars don't crash.

[databombers]

I LOVE MY MAC !

[arar]

@invisible planet would you recommend setting up a fixed size swap file on xp..I have 192mb of ram and a 1 gigs free drive? I used a fixed file under Win ME and it helped greatly....

[dirtyho]

I got mine fixed on win 2K, I use RAM size + 16mb

[invisibleplanet]

er....i don't know anything about that! i've had xp for around 2 months now...

please tell me what a fixed swap size file does!

[dirtyho]

It keeps the swapfile size fixed (windows dynamically resizes it). If you have lots of RAM this can improve performance by keeping the swapfile contiguous and preventing unnecessary fragmentation.

[dirtyho]

Windows uses this to "juggle" stuff in and out of RAM when it doesn't have enough. I think this technique is most effective when you have a lot of RAM. I've got a 1GB of RAM so thats why I do this.

[arar]

...I can testify that it certainly works very well on 98 and ME, but the last advice I saw about XP suggested that it didnt need to be set to a fixed size because XP's memory management is better (supposedly)..I am however beginning to doubt this advice....

[wheezer]

it all depends what and how you do it - really with upwards of 128 mb ram you don't need a big swap file anymore, I recommend a fixed size swap file which is the same size as the amount of memory you have at most - if there's some complaints about low memory at some point you can always up it a bit more.

[Sheridan]

Originally posted by Ruben A
PRO TOOLS!

lol

yeah I am going to have to second that motion!