Pardon my expectations, but hey, it's 2010 and computers have been around for nearly 30 years now, at least in the PC models. So why is it still so difficult to move from one PC to the next?
We've been upgrading on a regular basis, usually every three years or so. The fabled tech algorithm of Moore's Law asserts itself to double computing power every two years, and I've seen it all. My first PC was a Commodore 64, and the 64 was for the whopping fat 64 kilobytes of RAM, double the amount of other rivals like the Radio Shack TRS-80, dubbed the "Trash-80" by computer geeks of that day. To load a program you had to plug in your Dataset cassette player and play it to the computer on a normal tape cassette. It took all of 20 to 30 minutes to load a program until the first 1541 Floppy Drive was available for the C-64, which reduced program load times to a blazing 3 to 5 minutes.
Ah, those were the days. My desktop rig progressed quickly to an Amiga 1000 running in the neighborhood of 1.5 mhz, (yes, one and a half megahertz!) After a few years, I sold it and bought an IBM clone because it had something new that was unavailable for my Amiga, a 20 megabyte hard drive! The now legendary path was taken through the 286, 386, 486, Pentium 90, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, with my average upgrade resulting in about three to five times the power of its predecessor every three to four years. And the average cost of those early x86 systems was in the range of $3000, a lot of money back in the days they were bought, though the price kept dropping as the power kept increasing to keep me on the never ending staircase of upgrades. Along for the ride with all that hardware was the inevitable move from Windows 2.0, to Windows 3.0, 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT2000, Windows XP, service pack this or that, several hundred critical security updates, and thank god I jumped over Vista and went straight to Windows 7 this time.
We've been upgrading on a regular basis, usually every three years or so. The fabled tech algorithm of Moore's Law asserts itself to double computing power every two years, and I've seen it all. My first PC was a Commodore 64, and the 64 was for the whopping fat 64 kilobytes of RAM, double the amount of other rivals like the Radio Shack TRS-80, dubbed the "Trash-80" by computer geeks of that day. To load a program you had to plug in your Dataset cassette player and play it to the computer on a normal tape cassette. It took all of 20 to 30 minutes to load a program until the first 1541 Floppy Drive was available for the C-64, which reduced program load times to a blazing 3 to 5 minutes.
Ah, those were the days. My desktop rig progressed quickly to an Amiga 1000 running in the neighborhood of 1.5 mhz, (yes, one and a half megahertz!) After a few years, I sold it and bought an IBM clone because it had something new that was unavailable for my Amiga, a 20 megabyte hard drive! The now legendary path was taken through the 286, 386, 486, Pentium 90, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, with my average upgrade resulting in about three to five times the power of its predecessor every three to four years. And the average cost of those early x86 systems was in the range of $3000, a lot of money back in the days they were bought, though the price kept dropping as the power kept increasing to keep me on the never ending staircase of upgrades. Along for the ride with all that hardware was the inevitable move from Windows 2.0, to Windows 3.0, 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT2000, Windows XP, service pack this or that, several hundred critical security updates, and thank god I jumped over Vista and went straight to Windows 7 this time.
Now I've gone and made the biggest jump in computing power in my life, leaping from Pentium IV processor that benchmarked at about 486 to a new Core-i7 rig that delivers over eleven times the power, (benchmark 5680), and for less money than the old computer cost! There's nothing like taking a shiny new Dell out of the case for the very first time, but your elation is quickly quashed when the monumental task of data migration begins.
One question... Why did it take me all of two days before I could function again, in any normal sense of the word, on my new computer? Perhaps the upgrade path in the OS department accounted for the hours and hours of file transfers, software installations, and simply time discovering how Windows 7 did things differently than Windows XP. As I hooked up my Belkin Easy Transfer cable I found myself thinking about those days with my Dataset Cassette on the C-64. Easy? The transfer took much longer this time to feed new data to my machine! Sure, I was moving about 250 gigabytes of data, files, photos mp3s, and then re-installing all my applications again, hoping they would still work. But my basic experience had not changed since the days of the Dataset and C-64. I was still sitting there waiting for data to feed my new machine, though it would have taken me just under four million Commodore-64s to hold that amount of data, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
A long day later it was finally done, with the assistance of an external hard drive and an 8 gig memory key to move little things I had forgotten. The Windows “Easy Transfer Utility” had moved over my favorites from the much unused ie6 browser, but conveniently ignored all the favorites in my main browser, Firefox. After restoring those, I plugged in the Ethernet cable and prayed that Windows 7 could finally configure a network and establish an Internet connection all by itself. Alleluia! It did. So I settled back with a cup of coffee on my new rig and decided to set up any PC user's most critical application, my email.
Surprise! Windows 7 did not ship with any pre-installed email client. Imagine that! After twenty minutes searching the web about this gaf, I went online to download Mozilla Thunderbird, but its setup wizard was so screwed up that it just would not connect to my mail server. It kept insisting my server was IMAP, (when it was POP3), and trying to get it to configure correctly was a real fun game called “can you hit the manual install button faster than your new Core-I7 starts the automatic installation routine?” Oh, it imported all my old contacts and emails OK, but without access to the mail server, who cares? Sadly, I uninstalled Thunderbird and turned to Pegasus. It connected to the server with no problems, but could not import my old Outlook Express .dbx archives without me searching out how on the net and having to follow step 1, step 2, step 3 in some tech forum. I just did not have the time for major hassles like this. So I bit the bullet and went over to Microsoft, unable to believe there wasn't an email application for Windows 7. I found it in Windows Live Mail, which connected to my server just fine, and imported my contacts and most of my .dbx archives. (Some it just would not load.) Sigh... four hours later I finally had restored email service, and brother, I sure missed my old Commodore-64.
That accomplished I tested out all my new software installs and it was time to haggle with Adobe software that all wanted to phone home and tattle on me because it sensed my computer configuration had changed. So what? Hasn't Adobe ever heard of an upgrade before? I bought the darn software. Just install, if you please. And then kindly run! Is that to much to ask without having to do the Adobe serial number charade fifteen times, and find out Adobe doesn't support older versions of the software any longer, and that they wanted more money than my new rig cost me just so I could upgrade Photoshop, and Acrobat?
People, its 2010, and there was nothing easy at all about my file transfers or upgrade process. In fact, I would venture to say that the average person would have probably been stopped in their tracks innumerable times during the 48 hours my old faithful XP machine handed off mission critical data and software to my new rig. I was lucky that I had over 20 years of upgrades behind me to get me through the process, and still remain sane.
But all that accomplished I can now settle in in front of my dual monitor screen setup and strain to hear the sound of that new terabyte RAID-0 configuration as I contemplate what I hope will be another five years of computing before I have to do any of this again. What in the world will Microsoft be serving up in 2015, I wondered? To my horror, I discovered they are already working on the bugs in the early version of Windows 8!
Something tells me this “upgrade thing” is one part natural evolution and one part racket. We all just went through this with the HDTV conversion. Imagine if our washing machines all had to be upgraded every three years as well. Can you contemplate having to download the new “Maytag Easy Scrubware” utility to get your new washer to work, or to find out that your new machine was no longer compatible with your favorite laundry soap? And imagine having three choices when it came time to hook up your washer to the plumbing, like the three choices on the back of my new monitor, VGA, DVI and HDMI! (And of course, none of the required hookups were included with your new Machine).
I guess, as the Godfather once said: “This is the price you pay for the life you choose.” One thing I discovered about my new rig that didn't require a download or a patch...I still make the same old typos on the new computer. I can't wait to try out the new built in voice commands in Windows 7. I say "Open Sesame" and Windows opens my garage door instead.
With a smile,
John
One question... Why did it take me all of two days before I could function again, in any normal sense of the word, on my new computer? Perhaps the upgrade path in the OS department accounted for the hours and hours of file transfers, software installations, and simply time discovering how Windows 7 did things differently than Windows XP. As I hooked up my Belkin Easy Transfer cable I found myself thinking about those days with my Dataset Cassette on the C-64. Easy? The transfer took much longer this time to feed new data to my machine! Sure, I was moving about 250 gigabytes of data, files, photos mp3s, and then re-installing all my applications again, hoping they would still work. But my basic experience had not changed since the days of the Dataset and C-64. I was still sitting there waiting for data to feed my new machine, though it would have taken me just under four million Commodore-64s to hold that amount of data, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
A long day later it was finally done, with the assistance of an external hard drive and an 8 gig memory key to move little things I had forgotten. The Windows “Easy Transfer Utility” had moved over my favorites from the much unused ie6 browser, but conveniently ignored all the favorites in my main browser, Firefox. After restoring those, I plugged in the Ethernet cable and prayed that Windows 7 could finally configure a network and establish an Internet connection all by itself. Alleluia! It did. So I settled back with a cup of coffee on my new rig and decided to set up any PC user's most critical application, my email.
Surprise! Windows 7 did not ship with any pre-installed email client. Imagine that! After twenty minutes searching the web about this gaf, I went online to download Mozilla Thunderbird, but its setup wizard was so screwed up that it just would not connect to my mail server. It kept insisting my server was IMAP, (when it was POP3), and trying to get it to configure correctly was a real fun game called “can you hit the manual install button faster than your new Core-I7 starts the automatic installation routine?” Oh, it imported all my old contacts and emails OK, but without access to the mail server, who cares? Sadly, I uninstalled Thunderbird and turned to Pegasus. It connected to the server with no problems, but could not import my old Outlook Express .dbx archives without me searching out how on the net and having to follow step 1, step 2, step 3 in some tech forum. I just did not have the time for major hassles like this. So I bit the bullet and went over to Microsoft, unable to believe there wasn't an email application for Windows 7. I found it in Windows Live Mail, which connected to my server just fine, and imported my contacts and most of my .dbx archives. (Some it just would not load.) Sigh... four hours later I finally had restored email service, and brother, I sure missed my old Commodore-64.
That accomplished I tested out all my new software installs and it was time to haggle with Adobe software that all wanted to phone home and tattle on me because it sensed my computer configuration had changed. So what? Hasn't Adobe ever heard of an upgrade before? I bought the darn software. Just install, if you please. And then kindly run! Is that to much to ask without having to do the Adobe serial number charade fifteen times, and find out Adobe doesn't support older versions of the software any longer, and that they wanted more money than my new rig cost me just so I could upgrade Photoshop, and Acrobat?
People, its 2010, and there was nothing easy at all about my file transfers or upgrade process. In fact, I would venture to say that the average person would have probably been stopped in their tracks innumerable times during the 48 hours my old faithful XP machine handed off mission critical data and software to my new rig. I was lucky that I had over 20 years of upgrades behind me to get me through the process, and still remain sane.
But all that accomplished I can now settle in in front of my dual monitor screen setup and strain to hear the sound of that new terabyte RAID-0 configuration as I contemplate what I hope will be another five years of computing before I have to do any of this again. What in the world will Microsoft be serving up in 2015, I wondered? To my horror, I discovered they are already working on the bugs in the early version of Windows 8!
Something tells me this “upgrade thing” is one part natural evolution and one part racket. We all just went through this with the HDTV conversion. Imagine if our washing machines all had to be upgraded every three years as well. Can you contemplate having to download the new “Maytag Easy Scrubware” utility to get your new washer to work, or to find out that your new machine was no longer compatible with your favorite laundry soap? And imagine having three choices when it came time to hook up your washer to the plumbing, like the three choices on the back of my new monitor, VGA, DVI and HDMI! (And of course, none of the required hookups were included with your new Machine).
I guess, as the Godfather once said: “This is the price you pay for the life you choose.” One thing I discovered about my new rig that didn't require a download or a patch...I still make the same old typos on the new computer. I can't wait to try out the new built in voice commands in Windows 7. I say "Open Sesame" and Windows opens my garage door instead.
With a smile,
John
