Re: Incremental upgrades

Do you ever get the feeling on tech forums that when you make a joke you seem to be in the middle of a Aspergers convention?

Re: It's an intersting position.

Yeah I think someone somewhere ran the numbers quick and came up with a 'The Producers' style solution to get the testing done PDQ and $10 million back in the bank.

Mission for free anyone?

I'm sure that if they really wanted to they could have kept it up there longer or got it higher.

But I guess if you can get $10 million onto the books over the next few months.....

Re: Disappointing

Me too.

I was quite excited (well looking back maybe vaguely interested) when I thought of having the power of a S3 in a smaller package.

Then it turns out its not really a mini SIII at all, more a mini SII.5

Re: Ahem...People tend to buy PCs less frequently than they do laptops/phones and tablets.

So you are saying that if EVERYONE carried their PC around like they do their phones then they wouldn't last as long.

That's just genius! Who would have thought it!?

Erm except they dont, do they. Hence my point.

Re: windows is a niche OS

Well that 1% need to have more kids if they ever want it to grow cos I can't give Linux away to my customers that have used Windows, even if it means they get a PC for £100 less.

Re: Dont worry!

If the customer is desperate enough and the money is there its amazing what can be achieved.

These projects only take so long due to lawyers and people stringing the jobs out longer means...more money.

Its how BAe came to be so big. It doesn't really take 20 years to build an aircraft carrier or a fighter jet.

Re: Don't close the working ones

I have to say I hate driving past my local govt/council offices at 10pm to see most of the lights still on.

Why cant buildings have a central timer?

If staff are still in a place of work at 10pm that doesn't run shifts then something is wrong.

Dont worry!

As soon as the first brown-outs happen and folks can't toast a panini, watch X-Factor or charge their iPads, the whole green argument and planning red-tape will be trampled underfoot and we'll have four+ new reactors built and online within 5 years.

Shame we cant do it a little more progressively but that's how it works nowadays. No one gives a damn until they are directly affected.

Re: Power outages have benefits, too

It's not so daft.

Some years ago I switched to just spending 3 minutes in the shower each morning rather than the usual "however long I felt like it".

Saved me just over £100 in water and gas over the year. Thats just for ONE person. Now apply that to a family of four and surely its worth a try?

Also as both myself and my wife work from home now, we decided to apply the old "only flush the loo during the day if we really have to" routine.

After a year of doing that we are now down to a Solo tariff for our water which is a further saving.

Re: FAIL

Indeed.

Also the report says WXGA but it isnt.

C'mon Register stop reviewing this kind of crap. You are not doing anyone any favours here.

Re: Is it just a cunning plan...

Unlike the Apple herd that suckles so readily from a similar teat?

The tame tech press.

Yes the tech press really do need to get their priorities right.

Had modern computer tech back in the 80's just been down to Apple most of us would never have got to use a computer as an everyday item let alone own several of them for use at home and on the go.

It certainly wasn't Apple's efforts that gave most of them a career. Not that MS deserves a free pass but this current total reality disconnect that just because tech journos can do 99% of their (let's be honest) hardly that demanding job on just a phone and a tablet doesn't mean the rest of the working world should be able to as well.

Most people have to do boring but quite intensive jobs on their computers that tablets just don't cut it for.

And as for switching to Mac for doing those jobs on, well ask my other half that when she joined a web agency she caused gasps when she asked for a windows PC to do her job on rather than the 100% Mac environment they had. Anyway they gave her a £1200 PC (same as what they spent on Macs basically) and she loved it.

Unfortunately so did a lot of the Mac using staff. Why? Because hers was the only machine man enough to do a lot of the boring day to day tasks that the HR and accounts folks couldn't do on their Macs.

"Can I just run the payroll on your PC? My Mac just takes ages/crashes when I do it!"

But the tech journos say we should all be running such stuff on iPads!!??

Re: instagram?!

Instagram...now if ever there was an app for muppets...

"Yeah the idea for the app is we let people make their crappy photos even more crappy!"

"Who wil fall for that???"

"Who do you think..Hipsters!"

Re: Ping Cliff Joseph

I agree.

Re: Could it be because?

Spot on.

For 99% of business users a 2006 spec dual core PC with 2Gb of ram will do all the Office 2000/2003/2007/2010/2013 work you'd ever need.

Its not about folks not wanting desktops because they are crap. It's just that PC technology hit a plateau for many several years ago. It's been game over for desktop PC churn since dual cores came along.

Laptops only stay in there because they generally don't last as long as an old Dell desktop that never moves (if most business laptop owners were honest most of them don't move either).

However, tech pundits refuse to mention that because their job relies on getting people to buy flashy crap they don't need.

Re: stopping reviewing these favourably

I have mentioned this to a few tech sites that chances are the target audience don't want laptops costing more than £600 with low res screens and integrated Intel graphics so should stop reviewing them.

Basically tell the manufacturer's "Sorry but this machine falls below the standards our readers would want!"

Yes it might mean less laptops for review but then they (the manufacturers) might start asking why

Maybe set a Reg Hardware minimum spec requirement for kit submitted for review?

Otherwise why bother publishing reviews that just get laughed at?

By all means do the odd "£300-£400 laptop round up for your Mum/kids" article come Xmas but for the rest of us we need a little bit more.

Interesting article here about scaling for Windows 8 but it essentially holds true for Windows 7.

It doesn't work very well with high res but small screens.

http://techreport.com/review/23631/windows-8-ppi-scaling-on-the-zenbook-prime

1440x900 is about as high as you want to go at 13"

I would have expected a better GPU for that price too. At least something around the AMD 6450 level.

Re: MS are ANTI choice.

Hmm downvotes. I guess the stark reality that given the choice of a free operating system like Linux and paying £100 for Windows, most of the general public would still choose Windows is too much of a bitter pill for some to swallow.

Guys I've tried pushing Linux, I mean a sale is a sale even if its just on the hardware but they really really don't want linux. Everybody loves a freebie, just not Linux.

Another case was a kids group that had been given ten old Dell PCs with the OS removed. They didn't want to shell out for Windows (even going through the charity deal) so I installed Ubuntu on them. They only needed access to Facebook/Internet and a little Open Office.

At the same time I also gave them two Windows XP machines as backup.

Guess which machines get used all the time? Clue - The Linux machines haven't been switched on in a long time.

The year of Linux....never gonna happen.

It's a shame but really it's like flogging a dead horse.

Re: MS are ANTI choice.

Yes a little pause for thought for the Linux fans here.

I often get asked to get in or build pcs for customers. Sometimes they are a bit strapped for cash and so I will tell them they can have Ubuntu Linux or the like for free instead of windows. I give them a little demo to show it will do what they need.

I must have done this a dozen times or more. The result?

Not one took Linux. They all stumped up the extra for windows.

Linux - you really can't give it away.

Re: Win8 Most undesirble Chrimbo Present competition winner 2012. win8FAIL

All of you are wrong.

From what I've seen of my customers who have bought their kids a tablet, it's usually -

Broken tablet screen by new years eve. No more tablets.

Re: 3 doesn't seem to have a problem with large monthly traffic

What the hell are you guys doing with your phones to pull down that much data?

And over 3G too?? You must have you phones connected to the charger the whole time.

I make do with 500MB each month with capacity to spare.

Re: Destroyer of broadband connections

My dad had a similar experience. He was with some ISP that got merged into talkTalk over the years. Tiscali was it?

Well he started off with a 6MB connection and as TalkTalk took over and more companies got merged in the services got worse and worse. By last Xmas he was down to a intermittent 1Mb connection. It was truly useless.

We got in a new router etc. to no avail. We contacted TalkTalk and they just shrugged their shoulders. Nothing they could do.

So I told him to switch to BT. He was switched over a couple of weeks later, we plugged in the router and we had a rock solid 6.5Mb connection. It's been perfect ever since.

Re: This appears to be a growing trend.

Nope always managed to get paid for every job I've done.

Just a little rule I've always applied.

Oh and I forgot to include the descendants of the people who invented the sextant, the magnetic compass and cartography. I'm sure Apple will have a patent on those tucked away somewhere.

I'm sure Apple could have paid for any costs out of the spare change down the back of the sofas outside the boardroom.

I smell turnaround and dump so litigation ahoy with other map providers.

I'm sure TomTom/Garmin/Google/Nokia will be receiving served documents very soon.