COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Pluggy]

Stanley's install didn't have any problem with the software centre. That was one bit that did work properly. Stanley has some extra software to put on and I used it a couple of times. If you're a fan of Brasero disk burning software, its no longer part of the standard install. It has to be installed in 16.04. Canonical probably decided nobody burns CD& DVDs any more. There is a trend not to put optical drives on Modern PCs (particularly low end machines). Because its all done from "the cloud" these days. Many laptops nowadays have a blank lump of plastic covering the optical drive hole in the case.

[Pluggy]

Its time I got out of this business, A customer brings a fancy laptop come tablet thingy which is so compromised at the basic computer hardware level as to next to unusable. 2GB of RAM and 32GB of SSD storage neither of which can be upgraded. Windows can;t upgrade itself because there isn't enough free space. I've removed pretty much all I can and done the cleanup thing and there are virtually no private files on it (no photos, no music, no video and 1 document).I'm still 2 GB short. If it were a 10 year old wonder that started life with windows XP on it, is one thing, but this was manufactured in 2016. I want to cry.

Everything is an exercise in cost cutting, Customer wants something that looks like a super car, pays Ford Fiesta price and sort of ignores the Flymo Engine under the bonnet.

[Whyperion]

Why can these tablet thing not be upgraded, does it not have additional Micros SD card slot ? (is it addressing problems / limitations ?)

[Big Kev]

Its time I got out of this business, A customer brings a fancy laptop come tablet thingy which is so compromised at the basic computer hardware level as to next to unusable. 2GB of RAM and 32GB of SSD storage neither of which can be upgraded. Windows can;t upgrade itself because there isn't enough free space. I've removed pretty much all I can and done the cleanup thing and there are virtually no private files on it (no photos, no music, no video and 1 document).I'm still 2 GB short. If it were a 10 year old wonder that started life with windows XP on it, is one thing, but this was manufactured in 2016. I want to cry.

Everything is an exercise in cost cutting, Customer wants something that looks like a super car, pays Ford Fiesta price and sort of ignores the Flymo Engine under the bonnet.

Will the Win10 mobile OS do the job?

[Stanley]

Tiz, I'll lay a small bet you would like to have been sat in the rocking chair reading PE while Pluggy did the job.....
Plugs, it must be nice to have an eccentric machine where you can climb in the box to disconnect the data HD to keep it safe and then have 16gb of RAM to play with.... (and an eight cylinder engine.....) The separate drive also means that P was able to format the drive so he knew he was getting a clean start,
Everything is running fine. One thing I missed was the facility to force an upgrade but I found it yesterday and installed it. I like to run it just before I shut down each day. That's working well, good job it is because contrary to what it says on the tin, not all important upgrades are automatic, for instance yesterday it had a new Thunderbird and Firefox waiting in the wings.....

[Pluggy]

The thing is licensed for Win 10 Home. I think wiping it and reinstalling the latest image of Win 10 (16_07) will do it. It doesn't have major downloads to try and keep tabs on then.

It has an SD slot (not a micro) but the bulk of the card sticks out of the side of the machine rather than inside, it looks a mess and is vulnerable to damage. Not what I'd consider a solution.

Your machine isn't eccentric Stanley, I might have been struggling with Ubuntu 16.04 on it but when you ask it to do something it complies in a decent timeframe. Gimme a turbo charged V8 over a lawnmower any day.

I did try an external drive during the upgrade which windows 10 lets you do, it went further into the process but then croaked and said I needed more space on the system drive. The trouble is its so slow it takes 2 hours to get to that point.

The machine is a Lenovo Yoga 300. Apparently there are two versions, of this machine one has a faster processoor, 4GB of ram and 500GB storage which is made by Lenovo and theres this thing which looks identical, is made by company X and is £100 cheaper. You get what you pay for.

[Stanley]

"You get what you pay for". That says it all for me Pluggy. There are times when economy isn't sensible at all. You know that my philosophy has always been to put the maximum amount of RAM in that you can afford, have two HDs and reserve one for data only and take good advice on the chip and board. Never mind the wiseacres who say it is overkill, it's the cheapest and most efficient way in the long run. When I get my finances back in shape we are going to do it all again in Spades!
I have one small ongoing problem which is nothing to do with the upgrade, it was happening before. I am in the habit now of opening a new window in Firefox and streaming R4 in while I am working. Occasionally when I open another web address in the window I am using the R4 stream stops. I can restore it easily by going into the other window and restarting the stream but this morning I noted a message that I haven't seen before telling me that the Flash plug in had crashed and giving me a button to reinstate it which works. (I got an upgrade to Firefox yesterday so this might be part of that.) Is this all part of the old Ubuntu problem handling Flash?

[Tizer]

Tiz, I'll lay a small bet you would like to have been sat in the rocking chair reading PE while Pluggy did the job.....

You'd have won the bet on the basis that if I lived in Barlick I'd happily pay Pluggy to do the work for me. But on the other hand you might have lost because I wouldn't be able to sit back and read, I'd want to watch the master at work!

[Whyperion]

There is some problems that firefox depends how one sets up, opens windows and executes them only when active , quite where the toggle tool setting in settings is I cannot recall . (Chrome on windows is worse, particulary if the router is set up only to fetch on view and not as background task )

[Stanley]

He's best left alone. Besides, he mumbles while he is working and I can't understand a word he says! But you're right, we are lucky.....
One thing I have noticed is that as the FM3 settles down and recognises the new most-used pathways it is much faster opening programmes on demand. I know it sounds anthropomorphic but it's getting to know me and the way I work and is coping better with my orders. Pluggy will tell me that this is imagination perhaps but there is definitely and increase in speed. Gimp and Libre 5 in particular are much faster. I am rapidly getting to grips with the different ways that Gimp 2.8 works and on the whole they are an improvement.

[Big Kev]

Besides, he mumbles while he is working and I can't understand a word he says!.

Pluggy too? You sure it's not your hearing? You asked me if anyone else tells me I mumble...

[Tizer]

My dad used to tell everyone to stop mumbling. Then when he got hearing aids he complained we were shouting!

[Pluggy]

Besides, he mumbles while he is working and I can't understand a word he says!.

Pluggy too? You sure it's not your hearing? You asked me if anyone else tells me I mumble...

Gold, absolute gold. Beats having to defend myself.

I eventually got the Lenovo behaving. scrubbing it and starting again. Its using almost half its available storage with just raw windows 10 on. A couple of movies or a less than average music collection and its full......

[Stanley]

So (leaving aside the matter of my hearing!) does the OS learn and is the flash problem endemic in Ubuntu?

[Pluggy]

I think the Flash issues are as much Firefox as Ubuntu. The good news is that Flash is a dying technology, less and less sites use it these days. The BBC has evicted it and youtube killed it off a while back. I use Chromium almost exclusively nowadays, which is an open-source version of Chrome, but without Flash and without the Google branding Chrome has. And unlike chrome its in the standard Ubuntu repositories.

I think most modern operating systems learn, but how much varies.

[Pluggy]

Stanley, did I leave a cakebox of cd/dvds at your place when I was there ?, I've misplaced one and I last remember having it when I was sorting your computer.

[Stanley]

If you did I haven't seen it Pluggy. You're welcome to come and have a look.....

[Pluggy]

No, its OK Stanley, I'll have put it down elsewhere. Old age....

It doesn't contain anything I can't recreate.

[Stanley]

[Tizer]

Stanley, do you, like me, use gThumb for basic editing and archiving of photos? I'm finding gThumb difficult to use in Ubuntu 16.04, there are many changes which are confusing but I'm finding it unstable. Also the vertical scroll bars sometimes disappear.

[Stanley]

Yes I use it Tiz and it's running fine. The new version is better I reckon. Perhaps you need to zap it and reload? Mind you, they still haven't fixed that annoying little omission where normally once you have but the search term in you hit 'enter'. You still have to click on 'find'.

[Tizer]

I'm glad your Gthumb is OK and I'll do a re-install of mine. I don't want to have to change to another photo manager, I've liked using Gthumb and it suited me well. At the moment it's also showing some thumbnails as greyed out but they return to normal after a restart. Another little quirk at the moment is that whenever I open a book finding web site in Firefox it seems to think I'm in the USA. I can set their search boxes to `sellers in the UK' but even then all the delivery charges are for sending to the US. Curiously, the same is now happening on Mrs Tiz's computer and that's on Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit! Our system settings are all for UK and I can't find anything in Firefox preferences to set. Never had this problem in the past.

[Big Kev]

There's probably a global setting on the website somewhere, changing the search boxes to the UK will only change the search criteria, the website itself still sees you as being in the US. They've probably updated it recently and it's reset the defaults...

[PanBiker]

Firefox, I'm on 51.0.1

I assume you will have checked (from the menu bar) Tools / Options / Content? There is a preferred language for pages setting at the bottom.

[Stanley]

That happens to me occasionally Tiz. I think it's the servers not us. In g Thumb it always shows PDF files as grey but opens them if I ask it to.