This may seem a rant to some, it may help others and maybe someone will offer me some advice.
I have been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which, for those who aren’t familiar with it, the central character is searching for the true meaning of ‘Quality’ partially through his motorbike. The basic concept is that everyone has their own idea of what quality is but there isn’t a real definition.
I also came to the conclusion that my Celron based PC was reaching the end of it’s practical life and it was time for an update. I found a machine with an CORE i7 processor, SSD for Windows and conventional disk for data that looked reasonable for CHF 1000. The shop offered to set it up for CHF 90 but I declined as I wanted an English setup and to disable most of the logging (spy) functions.
Windows started up ok and I found the custom setup button and could turn most things off. I then installed Avast virus protection, Adobe reader and a couple of other small programs without problems, taking care to read each screen to look for custom setups and to avoid things I didn’t want.
Now log into Microsoft to install my Office Home and Student edition. I could only get this as a licence number not a disc. Can’t log in! Looking closely at everything I found that Microsoft had changed the keyboard from Swiss German to English so the special characters in my password were wrong. Why did it do that? Are they completely American Centred? When I had resolved this and completed the Office installation I had to delve deep in setting to set the default back to Swiss German and delete the English option.
I tried to reinstall Windows Live Mail as my email client and found it was discontinued. The recommended replacement was Mail which is even more basic. I tried to set this up but my Swisscom mail server was not on the preferred list so a manual setup was required. Eventually with the aid of the Swisscom Assistant Program I got it to send and receive emails. Can anyone suggest a better email client? The other option is to buy Outlook which is probably what MS want you to do.
Next up was DraftSight, the CAD package I use for my model making. This installed ok but wouldn’t activate with my usual email Address. I opened up a new Yahoo mail address but still when I responded to the activation email there was an error. Trying to log in to the help forum also didn’t work so I guessed the problem was at their end and would try again in the week.
Finally I tried to link it into my home network. Homegroup had also been discontinued and they seemed to want you to do everything in the Cloud. No thank you. After a lot of playing with file settings I was able to share the relevant folders with my netbook. Yet another thing that had been made harder as a marketing ploy.
On Monday I tried to activate DraftSight again and this time it worked so the problem was at their end. Next problem, when I tried to open a drawing the antivirus program leapt in and blocked it. If you said allow access it opened the drawing as read only. No Good. I then had to delve in the Avast settings to turn off this ‘Active Protection’ function. I guess that the problem was this was a newer version of DS and tried to alter some settings on open the drawing. Perhaps if I open and save every drawing I will be able to turn active protection back on.
So did I find Quality? No.
Is this a normal experience in setting up a new PC? Unfortunately I expect so.
Is it possible to improve the experience? What does the panel think?
Best regards
Roger
