Posts by Greg J Preece 2481 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Double post! Following on from my original rant, a colleague of mine has described exactly the same symptoms on much more mainstream hardware, and we noticed something - installations are still really fast. So why does one type of file copying run fast, and one run slow? Is it something to do with privileges? Wonder if disabling UAC would help.
Suggestions?
I really, honestly, truly like Windows 7, and it works perfectly, except for one thing. One fundamental flaw: the little bastard will still only copy files at 1.5MB/s, and deleting them is no faster. WHAT THE FECKING HELL? I've tried changing, updating and reinstalling the storage controller drivers, but nothing helps. I don't want to see 1.5MB/s on anything in 2009 - my net connection's faster than that!
And before anyone starts on with that "crappy hardware" nonsense, this is a quad core box with 15000rpm hard drives. It does *not* dick around, and under XP x64 I would easily get 80MB/s between drives, no problem. I don't think it's the drivers either, because loading from the disk is still fast as hell - it's just anything involving a write that's slow.
I wouldn't pay 90p for an operating system that couldn't do the most basic operations without cocking them up, let alone £90 (or £150, as it now is).
If I can't figure out a way to make this thing...
a) Stop pausing for a couple of minutes halfway through the bootup process (no disk activity, nothing)
b) Start copying/deleting files at a reasonable pace
c) Stop lagging the rest of the system when copying large filesets (talk about kicking a guy while he's down)
...then it's going back under "unfit for purpose", which I believe trumps their EULA any day. Still got my copy of XP x64, and I am not waiting 5 minutes per module for a Maven build because Win7 wants to take its time with copying.
It's a real shame, because other than that, it's great, and worth the upgrade from XP.
Kubuntu Karmic would kick this thing's ass if I could get it to work properly with my Triplehead2Go.
Probably a lot more expensive, but look at it - that's a proper 20th century spaceship, and no messin'. Let's design an updated version of that. Higher payload, greater capability, and let's not forget - more internal space! What the hell happened to Venturestar anyway?
"MS have a larger browser market share than all the other browsers put together and yet the complaint is that they don't conform to standards. What sort of standard is created that isn't support by the clear market leader... a sub-standard!"
That has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Worse than BBC tech reporting.
Been running it since the 3rd or 4th alpha, and despite a massive cockup in alpha 5, it's a nice improvement over Jaunty. Faster, definitely, and the tweaks to KDE are very much welcome, along with a network manager that finally works (though still not as well as the one in GNOME, which is superb). It doesn't bring a lot in the way of features, but as with all Ubuntu releases it's that steady march that slowly brings in more speed, fewer bugs/annoyances, and greater compatibility.
As much as I like Win7 (and I do) I still spend most of my time in Karmic.
"ARCH has campaigned against the use of body scanners on children, arguing they are disproportionately intrusive and remove their right to dignity, particularly given many are sensitive about their bodies."
But adults are OK, naturally. How could we possibly object to a full body X-ray every time we want to get on a flight?
Mine does that when it's on full power. Doesn't bother me when it's plugged in, but obviously on battery power it's annoying, so I use Guidance Power Manager to automatically downclock the CPU/drop the brightness. CPU fan almost immediately stops and the heat goes away, and for general surfing/work, I really can't tell the difference.
Duh, I know more people than Canonical contribute. That's kinda the point. But what end user cares about who slowly improved and then fixed it (though the proprietary nVidia drivers are sexy) - all the end user cares about is that it works. "They" refers to "whoever fixed that", because it's a damn sight more productive than the Canonical lot arguing over what to call the Home folder.
@AC 21:01
FUD? Here's something you might want to consider: your setup is not the same as mine. Perhaps it worked for you and did not for me. Hmm? Next time, engage brain before fingers.
And it's awesome. Fast as hell, compatible with all but one of my machines, and KDE 4.3.1 is very nice indeed. The huge improvement for me was in multi-monitor support. It didn't work at all in Hardy, was a bit mental in Intrepid, was still buggy in Jaunty, but works perfectly in Karmic. Glad they finally sorted that.
That said, the reason I'm still on alpha 4 is how badly they buggered up alphas 5 and 6. A set of updates came down and crippled the entire OS on two of my machines. Fortunately, we're talking about Ubuntu here, so a reinstallation took less than an hour, but it was still annoying. Hopefully the problems are fixed in beta 1. I'll try it in a VM this time...
And why in the hell does GNOME have an option to turn off touchpad tapping, but KDE doesn't? It's infuriating!
Didn't the Foxsat kinda beat them to the game by a long way? When I had Freesat installed, the Foxsat was the only receiver worth buying. Plus, they already have a version that will record, have done for some time, and this receiver offers little or nothing above Humax's offering.
Fail. Though they would get kudos from me if they could code the Ethernet stuff properly. My Foxsat constantly pisses me off by forgetting its static IP settings every time I turn it on.
Not being able to browse your music would annoy me a little, though I could accept that as part of the point, but not being able to use my own headphones (or pay through the nose Apple-style for some Approved Listening Devices)? Get stuffed. Never in a million years. Apple's headphones are shite, the others will be prohibitively expensive. I'll keep my Shures, TYVM.
I agree that you should be able to uninstall Internet Explorer, but calling Windows a suite rather than an OS because it comes with a browser and media player is a little strange. Again, Ubuntu comes with a default media player (and that one IS crap), as does Mac OSX. You don't seem to have a problem with those...
Microsoft should be able to bundle any bloody browser they like with their OS. It's...their OS! Safari in Mac OSX, Firefox in Ubuntu, IE in Windows. I don't have a problem with that.
The real problem is that Windows comes bundled with everything. It is almost impossible to buy a non-Mac computer without paying the Windows tax. That's BS. Users should be presented with a list of operating systems when buying a new computer. That might help even the scales a bit, but slagging off Microsoft for putting one of their own products inside one of their own products is nonsense at best.
And as other people have said, Opera should STFU at this point.
And I like that. :-)
"I swear most of the people in our Currys just go in there to take a look at things in the flesh, and then go home and order them online. That and annoying the staff with blindingly stupid questions."
Yup, that's pretty much it. Same with PC World, with the exception that a friend and I have a long-standing rule regarding PCW: every time we're in there, at least one sales stand must be sabotaged in some way. Our current favourite is connecting my iAudio S9 (iPods can kiss my ass) to the new Samsung surround sound units with Bluetooth, then blasting out whatever we feel like at mildly illegal volumes. When they run over to turn the machine off, pause it right before they get there. If they turn their back, hit play again. It's like playing with cats.
"And get rid to the stupid names. "CatFish"...WTF is that? This is a computer, not an aquarium. "Nautilus"...WTF does that do? "Totem"...any clues there? "baobab"...in the name of god people. If it's a file searcher why not call it, I dunno, "FileSearch"? Or is that just too logical, too usable and too simple?"
Yeah, Windows apps are much better for that sort of thing:
Vista?
Silverlight?
Firefox?
Thunderbird?
Trillian?
OMG, without their purpose being in the name, I have no idea what these apps do! How can I possibly use them?
Idiot.
"I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Insipid Imbecile or whatever), and Firefox 3.5 isn't in the repository,"
Yes it is.
Man, I love listening to people who don't bother trying, don't even Google stuff, then just start moaning and whining. It's not the main FF package in 9.04 because it was developed after 9.04. Given enough time they would have upgraded the package, but decided to keep two separate ones, and make 3.5 the default in 9.10, out in a months' time.
What I'm happy about is that they finally put Netbeans 6.7 into 9.10's repository. Thank God for that!
Quit thine bitching.
I'm with you on this. Who cares if the rest of the universe is using Windows? Let's stop making shiny gadgets designed to attract them and fix the stuff that's important. As someone else said, 5 different incomplete sound managers are useless. We need one that does everything properly.
This is why I'm brushing up on my C++ and Perl skills as fast as possible. I want to start contributing to Linux - not on the flashy stuff, but on the important stuff. I want to help make the sound stack work properly. I want to add in those missing options in apps that everyone wishes were there. Let's just quit fecking around for a bit and finish one version of Ubuntu - properly. If we took Karmic and just worked on it for a year, sorting out every little last thing, then released that, it would be far more popular than something flashier with the same old glitches.
1) You'll be the only one with a wireless charging laptop, so you'll be the only one using your expensive charger, so you might as well...use a bloody wired one!
2) This will take longer to charge the same battery and will result in stupid amounts of energy loss - very environmentally friendly, I'm sure.
3) If the idea of this is that you can pick it up and move around, what's to stop you moving in and out of range, constantly ragging your battery until it dies?
4) For all this and more, it'll cost a small fortune.
To hell with that shit. I want my laptop to charge in an hour, not trickle charge for 6 hours.
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