treeve
Major Contributor
I have hinted at the other troubles underlying the fracas with Orange.
Broadband since solved, but there is the other issue of Vista.
As you know, the Orange and all that was set up on the Hewlett Packard Compaq Presario; the idea was to have two PCs - one to use for work the other to use on the internet, thereby ensuring one PC free of any contact with external influences. However, I discovered at a later date that being installed with the Vista O/S it no longer supported Outlook Express. It was vital to me to have OE as I have stored folders of emails from 1996, some of which I read on a weekly basis, as they include research material and photographs of family research and ship histories. They are all on files suffixed pbx, I have them on external drives as well for security. However they need to be read, and the 'new improved' version does not; it uses pst files (source 'pst, wanna buy a loadarubbish?'). So, I ended up using the PC and the laptop for OE - as that was installed with XP, the last O/S with a nod towards sanity. I continued in all bliss working on the Packard Bell, the machine I had been using for two years, cleaning and clearing it of anything connected with the net, and writing documents, html fo rthe websites, images, etc. ... until it just faded on me; XP and all .... and a lot of recent work (a fortnight's files are a lot). The rest are on external drives. Having discovered that the DVD write responded to the occasional prod, I reasoned it was not a power supply problem; poking around, the motherboard was dead. I gingerly extracted the hard drive, to discover it was actually ok, and it is in a USB box and can now be used in isolation, and read (and written to if necessary). That left me with one PC - the Vista ridden Presario. I needed XP - so I had to buy a reconditioned jobby, which I found, an hp pavilion t370.uk. So I started to pare down the Vista machine, copying everything that had accumulated since the burn out.
The point being that I had been presented EVERY day with failures from Vista, mostly in the middle of some session online or on Word or on other programmes, and they were mostly of a part of Windows that had stopped working, so it was like watching the screen staccato fashion, suddenly going blank with a pathetic apology from Windows afterwards. I can tell you there were some choice words sent in their new error reporting software sent back to MS Windows. I tried all ways to get the O/S sorted, the updates grew day by day - all security bound, which rather raises questions about the saftey online, what?
I checked on the stability report on Windows own files; It was disgusting, not a day went by without a serious failure and then some hanging closures - the worst. I tried to even set windows into Dive D, I then in a last attempt tried to reformat to at least recover the drive and its 200G for use as a storage media. Even from DOS it refused. So the waste of money is out on the landing with the other burnt out PC. All the work spent on re-building the drive and patching in software to do the job that Vista cannot do (a full text search of all files, a proper catalogue of the files on the drive, etc), as well as all the installation of other software, etc, was wasted and i will have to do all over again; I know my files are secure on drives (in duplicate, and in some cases in triplicate) but it still has to take a long time to recatalogue and copy them again on to another drive, on the pavilion.
But, I have made the start ... first get rid of IE8 and its clear financial partnerships. I set up visuals as I like them, set up Classic Windows frames and directories, an 'improvement' that uses so much space on screen to look garish is not an improvement. Somewhere between pretty and ugly ... pretty ugly. At least now I have a pleasing set up that works .... next the external drives - all five of them. Let alone the research work on the shelves to be picked up again. Never a dull day. ::6:
Broadband since solved, but there is the other issue of Vista.
As you know, the Orange and all that was set up on the Hewlett Packard Compaq Presario; the idea was to have two PCs - one to use for work the other to use on the internet, thereby ensuring one PC free of any contact with external influences. However, I discovered at a later date that being installed with the Vista O/S it no longer supported Outlook Express. It was vital to me to have OE as I have stored folders of emails from 1996, some of which I read on a weekly basis, as they include research material and photographs of family research and ship histories. They are all on files suffixed pbx, I have them on external drives as well for security. However they need to be read, and the 'new improved' version does not; it uses pst files (source 'pst, wanna buy a loadarubbish?'). So, I ended up using the PC and the laptop for OE - as that was installed with XP, the last O/S with a nod towards sanity. I continued in all bliss working on the Packard Bell, the machine I had been using for two years, cleaning and clearing it of anything connected with the net, and writing documents, html fo rthe websites, images, etc. ... until it just faded on me; XP and all .... and a lot of recent work (a fortnight's files are a lot). The rest are on external drives. Having discovered that the DVD write responded to the occasional prod, I reasoned it was not a power supply problem; poking around, the motherboard was dead. I gingerly extracted the hard drive, to discover it was actually ok, and it is in a USB box and can now be used in isolation, and read (and written to if necessary). That left me with one PC - the Vista ridden Presario. I needed XP - so I had to buy a reconditioned jobby, which I found, an hp pavilion t370.uk. So I started to pare down the Vista machine, copying everything that had accumulated since the burn out.
The point being that I had been presented EVERY day with failures from Vista, mostly in the middle of some session online or on Word or on other programmes, and they were mostly of a part of Windows that had stopped working, so it was like watching the screen staccato fashion, suddenly going blank with a pathetic apology from Windows afterwards. I can tell you there were some choice words sent in their new error reporting software sent back to MS Windows. I tried all ways to get the O/S sorted, the updates grew day by day - all security bound, which rather raises questions about the saftey online, what?
I checked on the stability report on Windows own files; It was disgusting, not a day went by without a serious failure and then some hanging closures - the worst. I tried to even set windows into Dive D, I then in a last attempt tried to reformat to at least recover the drive and its 200G for use as a storage media. Even from DOS it refused. So the waste of money is out on the landing with the other burnt out PC. All the work spent on re-building the drive and patching in software to do the job that Vista cannot do (a full text search of all files, a proper catalogue of the files on the drive, etc), as well as all the installation of other software, etc, was wasted and i will have to do all over again; I know my files are secure on drives (in duplicate, and in some cases in triplicate) but it still has to take a long time to recatalogue and copy them again on to another drive, on the pavilion.
But, I have made the start ... first get rid of IE8 and its clear financial partnerships. I set up visuals as I like them, set up Classic Windows frames and directories, an 'improvement' that uses so much space on screen to look garish is not an improvement. Somewhere between pretty and ugly ... pretty ugly. At least now I have a pleasing set up that works .... next the external drives - all five of them. Let alone the research work on the shelves to be picked up again. Never a dull day. ::6:
