How many of you are OS holdouts / luddites? Still clinging to your favorite OS?

[poohbear]

I finally bought a smart phone last year and it's used for emergencies only. GPS is disabled and I have a piece of tape over the camera. It sits in once spot 99.9% of the time. It's only turned on once a day to check for calls and messages which I rarely get. Myself and others realized a long time ago that smart phones and tablets were nothing but data collection spy devices. I treat mine like toys and assume all info will be shared. Nice try though...

So...ure basically the Unabomber? seriously, u have a piece of tape over the camera?!? What makes u think ure so important that the government would give a crap about what ure doing?

 

[lxskllr]

What makes u think ure so important that the government would give a crap about what ure doing?

What makes you think you should question his choices? If he doesn't want an exposed camera, he shouldn't have one, and he doesn't have to justify his choices to anyone. That's what it means to be free.

 

[balloonshark]

So...ure basically the Unabomber? seriously, u have a piece of tape over the camera?!? What makes u think ure so important that the government would give a crap about what ure doing?

I value my privacy so I'm automatically a terrorist?

You would cover your webcams too if you have heard of a RAT (remote access trojan). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...e-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/

 

[RampantAndroid]

Wait...so Vista was not worth touching. But Windows 7, which by your own admission, was basically the same thing and was awesome?

Did you use Vista very much? Its first 6-8 months were marked by driver issues and some design flaws (like all of a GPU's VRAM being allocated to a program's virtual memory space.) Beyond that, Vista was a pretty great OS I found - it was certainly not a night and day change going from Vista to Windows 7 (which I did at Win7 RTM) since by then Vista was pretty stable. Going back to XP from Vista however WAS painful for me. I loved the extra things Vista added. Just being able to open start and type to find a program or run a command was awesome by itself.

For Windows 8, I'll be one of the people who says it wasn't so bad. I was using it daily until 8.1 was out, which I used until Windows 10. My point is that all of these had functional UIs that you could get used to. Before one of the updates added back a power button on 8.1's start menu, I simply got used to hitting the windows key and typing "shutdown -r -t 0" to shut down instead of finding the bloody button. - so I certainly worked around its quirks, but it was very much usable.

Maybe I'm just less sensitive to GUI changes - I'd rather complain about my keyboard being crappy (which it is right now. Wife hates Cherry MX Blue switches it turns out...and it'll be a while until I get laser cut mounting plates for a custom keyboard with some MX Clear switches.) I guess we all have things we're picky about.

 

[RampantAndroid]

I value my privacy so I'm automatically a terrorist?

You would cover your webcams too if you have heard of a RAT (remote access trojan). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...e-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/

You know, if someone has total control over my system, them seeing me is the last of my concerns. Them having access to...you know, all my files and such - that's more of a concern. But this is why you watch what sites you visit and run some kind of anti-malware.

 

[balloonshark]

You know, if someone has total control over my system, them seeing me is the last of my concerns. Them having access to...you know, all my files and such - that's more of a concern. But this is why you watch what sites you visit and run some kind of anti-malware.

There is no such thing as a safe site. If you have ever went hunting for malware and uploaded it to virustotal you would know that you can't fully trust scanners.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Wait...so Vista was not worth touching. But Windows 7, which by your own admission, was basically the same thing and was awesome?

I was talking about it being overall similar in terms of usability. The problem with Vista is it had TERRIBLE performance. It was and still is a huge pig on resources. It's just so slow. Everything you do with Vista you have to wait, and the system is constantly thrashing. Put 7 on the same machine and it will be 10x faster. Vista is basically the beta version of 7.

 

[RampantAndroid]

There is no such thing as a safe site. If you have ever went hunting for malware and uploaded it to virustotal you would know that you can't fully trust scanners.

I've read plenty of the reports that highlight detection percentages. Safe sites are ones like NYT, RCP and such. Stay off the random sites advertising to download things and such. They're not impervious, but they are well maintained. These days you're more likely to have accounts hacked, not your PC.

 

[sweenish]

What makes you think you should question his choices? If he doesn't want an exposed camera, he shouldn't have one, and he doesn't have to justify his choices to anyone. That's what it means to be free.

If he doesn't want an exposed camera, maybe don't buy a phone with one. Given the post in question, they absolutely wasted their money buying a smartphone, period.

But look at me, questioning choices. How dare I. I guess if someone were to rob your house and say it was their choice, you're not allowed to question it? That argument has a limit in that it could potentially apply to ANYTHING and that's obviously stupid, I suppose the trick is figuring it out.

 

[sweenish]

I was talking about it being overall similar in terms of usability. The problem with Vista is it had TERRIBLE performance. It was and still is a huge pig on resources. It's just so slow. Everything you do with Vista you have to wait, and the system is constantly thrashing. Put 7 on the same machine and it will be 10x faster. Vista is basically the beta version of 7.

Simply not true.

 

[lxskllr]

If he doesn't want an exposed camera, maybe don't buy a phone with one. Given the post in question, they absolutely wasted their money buying a smartphone, period.

Link to a smartphone without cameras.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Link to a smartphone without cameras.

They exist.

Or the third option...

 

[lxskllr]

They exist.

Or the third option...

I like the third option, which is what balloonshark used. Otherwise, I'd remove/destroy the cameras in the phone of my choosing(job sensitive context).

 

[balloonshark]

If he doesn't want an exposed camera, maybe don't buy a phone with one. Given the post in question, they absolutely wasted their money buying a smartphone, period.

But look at me, questioning choices. How dare I. I guess if someone were to rob your house and say it was their choice, you're not allowed to question it? That argument has a limit in that it could potentially apply to ANYTHING and that's obviously stupid, I suppose the trick is figuring it out.

It was an Amazon Fire phone with 1 year of Prime for $140. Considering the specs of the phone and the free year of Prime I don't think I wasted much money although the deal did go as low as $120 before they sold out. I should have bought a 2nd at $120 for the Prime and sold the phone or used it as a backup.

The entire point of my post was to prove that people who dislike Win10 and its telemetry and cloud features aren't necessarily hypocrites who have have tons of personal info on their smart phones.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Simply not true.

Well my experience proves otherwise. Interestingly I had to use a Vista machine today. It took a good minute just for "computer management" to come up. Clicking start menu took a good 30 seconds to a minute for it to come up as well. It's just a terribly slow OS. Every single vista machine I have come across has been that slow. Thankfully in this case it was just to check the specs of the machine before doing a wipe. I'll probably put 7 or Linux on it.

I think the main issue with vista is that it's just so I/O intensive. It probably runs better on a SSD.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Red Squirrel,

I am using a C2D era laptop w/ 2.5 gigs of ram with a slow 5400 rpm disk, as we speak. You'd be surprised, how well Vista runs here. What you describe of course is unacceptable, not sure what's wrong with your box. Vista SP2 is on par with 7 SP1 in my own experience, and in some ways I like it more (more aggressive prefetch mechanism, for one).

If anything, I'd upgrade it to 8.1 or 10, nothing less. And it isn't like I am used to using slow things. This thing when configured properly runs well enough. Vista is disk intensive, just like anything newer than XP SP3 (after a while it gets better, though). I have three spare SSDs on hand, you can imagine that if I am content with the performance here with a slow mobile hard drive, then it must be good enough. Of course, I am not doing anything disk intensive here anyway (like editing videos for example or booting/shutting down all the time), just light browsing and watching YouTube <=720p videos. For anything more cpu/disk intensive, this thing would prolly annoy me to hell. Well, I have a different computer for that purpose. By the way, I have exactly the same laptop w/ Windows 10 on it, and while it is faster, no question about that; Windows 10 still won't play 1080p videos smooth enough either, so why bother. So people not willing to upgrade, I can understand that.

NB.

 

[Dude111]

I value my privacy so I'm automatically a terrorist?

Yup thats how those of us THEY HAVENT BEEN ABLE TO BRAINWASH THANKFULLY are looked at.... People who can still THINK FOR THEMSELVES!!

 

[sweenish]

Well my experience proves otherwise. Interestingly I had to use a Vista machine today. It took a good minute just for "computer management" to come up. Clicking start menu took a good 30 seconds to a minute for it to come up as well. It's just a terribly slow OS. Every single vista machine I have come across has been that slow. Thankfully in this case it was just to check the specs of the machine before doing a wipe. I'll probably put 7 or Linux on it.

I think the main issue with vista is that it's just so I/O intensive. It probably runs better on a SSD.

Your experience is ANECDOTAL and proves jack.

Because Vista was perfectly fine for me. See how little anecdotes matter? I also know no one that actually hated it when they ran it on hardware capable of the OS. And no, it didn't need a beefy computer, it just needed one with modern specs, not the garbage OEMs were shoving down the pipe at the time.

Vista wasn't just necessary from a security standpoint, either. OEMs were literally killing the PC in their race to the bottom that XP was inadvertently facilitating.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Red Squirrel,

I am using a C2D era laptop w/ 2.5 gigs of ram with a slow 5400 rpm disk, as we speak. You'd be surprised, how well Vista runs here. What you describe of course is unacceptable, not sure what's wrong with your box. Vista SP2 is on par with 7 SP1 in my own experience, and in some ways I like it more (more aggressive prefetch mechanism, for one).

If anything, I'd upgrade it to 8.1 or 10, nothing less. And it isn't like I am used to using slow things. This thing when configured properly runs well enough. Vista is disk intensive, just like anything newer than XP SP3 (after a while it gets better, though). I have three spare SSDs on hand, you can imagine that if I am content with the performance here with a slow mobile hard drive, then it must be good enough. Of course, I am not doing anything disk intensive here anyway (like editing videos for example or booting/shutting down all the time), just light browsing and watching YouTube <=720p videos. For anything more cpu/disk intensive, this thing would prolly annoy me to hell. Well, I have a different computer for that purpose. By the way, I have exactly the same laptop w/ Windows 10 on it, and while it is faster, no question about that; Windows 10 still won't play 1080p videos smooth enough either, so why bother. So people not willing to upgrade, I can understand that.

NB.

It's not my system - I just went with 7 when I upgraded from XP. It's every single computer (many different people's) I have ever used that had Vista which gives the same experience. If I click the start menu and have to wait more than 1 second for it to come up, to me this is unacceptable. Maybe I'm just used to my own machine. I think the only time I saw a Vista machine that was a somewhat acceptable speed was when a friend built a high end gaming machine with super high end specs (for the time, this is going back like 8 years now, so like a quad core, 8GB of ram, 7200rpm drive, etc), and even then the CPU was never idle, and hard drive was thrashing quite a lot. It would be interesting to see WTF that OS does in the background, I've never seen an OS that is so busy doing nothing.

But yeah part of the issue is when it came out originally OEMs were putting it on ridiculously undersized hardware. You need AT LEAST 4GB of ram and a quad core, 2 or 3Ghz processor for it to even be semi usable. Idealy you want a SSD though due to how I/O intensive it is. SSD probably matters more than anything actually.

Windows 7 will run on lower end hardware much better though. Linux will run even better. In general Windows is bloated, no idea how they manage it to make it that bad.

 

[sandorski]

Did the Upgrade last night from 8.1. So far liking it, but ran into an issue I have read somewhere someone else had, Alt/Tabbing from a game. Only tried from 1 so far, Civ IV, so perhaps it is a limited issue. Tabbed out of the game and couldn't Tab back in. Everything seemed to be in the game except the Video. Task Manager wouldn't close it, my mouse cursor still seemed in the game, but right clicking the game icon on the toolbar and choosing Close Window closed it.

Rather annoying, but something that will get fixed, unless it's Civ IV specific.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

This isn't a Luddite issue. JackMDS also suggested "practical finance" or "personal budgeting." Maybe parts of those things figure into it.

My experience with "Windows" began with version 3.0. With every new version, when I had two IT-related jobs -- burned the candle at both ends -- and spent money as an "investment" in keeping up" -- I'd upgrade at the first release.

Then I'd go through weekends and evenings of troubleshooting HW and SW and dealing with "issues." This behavior changed as I retired and began to manage my fixed income more seriously. But I was also managing my time and convenience.

My whole practical life revolves around my data and document archives, workable software and other factors. So when I have 5 desktops (with a server) and one laptop hooked up on the household LAN, backed up every night, etc. etc. -- I am very cautious about introducing something new with unforeseen consequences.

I may upgrade my old laptop to Win 10 before middle or end of May to see how it goes.

 

[Executioner]

Back to the original topic, yes I'm a hold out for 7 and 8.1. I do have 10 on a spare laptop, but I just can't seem to accept it. There is also a possibility that it will become a subscription service which I don't want. Once 7 expires, I'll either keep using it, move to 8.1, or go with Linux. I may dedicate 10 for playing games via Steam and nothing more.

 

[mv2devnull]

I do agree with JackMDS and BonzaiDuck.


Still clinging? No.

My favourite OS is "latest, fully updated". A moving target. I did one test installation of it on NAS over iSCSI for current machine has limited local storage, but the NAS isn't online. Cannot break what works.

Thus, for time being, I'm limited to "no-longer-latest" OS. Losing the latest-status does not rot a well-chosen OS overnight.

 

[sweenish]

This isn't a Luddite issue. JackMDS also suggested "practical finance" or "personal budgeting." Maybe parts of those things figure into it.

My experience with "Windows" began with version 3.0. With every new version, when I had two IT-related jobs -- burned the candle at both ends -- and spent money as an "investment" in keeping up" -- I'd upgrade at the first release.

Then I'd go through weekends and evenings of troubleshooting HW and SW and dealing with "issues." This behavior changed as I retired and began to manage my fixed income more seriously. But I was also managing my time and convenience.

My whole practical life revolves around my data and document archives, workable software and other factors. So when I have 5 desktops (with a server) and one laptop hooked up on the household LAN, backed up every night, etc. etc. -- I am very cautious about introducing something new with unforeseen consequences.

I may upgrade my old laptop to Win 10 before middle or end of May to see how it goes.

Were you not using Windows 3.0? Was it not an investment? Did you not have issues?

The quotes make no sense.

And perhaps it isn't a luddite issue FOR YOU. That's great.

For others, it absolutely is.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's also a question of if it aint broke don't fix it. Do you get a new car just because a new model comes out? The car companies would sure like that but it would be insane from a financial perspective. With a computer it's more than just a financial thing, it's the idea of having to reconfigure everything again. Even with Linux, I don't upgrade every single time there's a new release of my distro, I want to do more with my time than constantly reinstalling and resetting up everything. MS has been aggressive with new releases, it's insane to expect people to upgrade each time, especially companies.