Author: ocracokewaves

A now sane individual who escaped the world of selling technology, now living in the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont. I have been at one time or another, a farmer, a director for Apple, and a vice president at Wideopen Networks. I continue to pursue my love of photography and writing. I have great memories of boating, fishing, kayaking, swimming, and hiking the beaches along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where we lived for fifteen years.

Mt. Lion & MacMini aren’t compatible?

I got a real surprise with my new Mac Mini.  It turns out there are are multiple versions of OS 10.8.2 floating around.  Only one of them will boot a new MacMini and if you try to download that version from the App Store for an external drive, it won’t let you even it you have already purchased Mountain Lion.  http://t.co/rOUNLHus

wecouldnotcompleteyourpurchase

Windows 8 Arrives in Our House

windows8wmI will admit up front that I am a life-long Apple user.  I got my first Apple in 1982.  I worked at Apple for almost twenty years.  I used MS/DOS before I went to work for Apple, but I didn’t really spend any time with Windows until 2004 when I bought a Dell Pentium 3 desktop with Windows XP.  I hoped to use it for GIS, but I got sidetracked and ended up using it as a general purpose machine and installing Linux on a second hard drive.

In 2007, I bought a HP laptop with Vista.  In 2010 I replaced it with one that was running Windows 7.  I ended up giving my original Windows 7 machine to my youngest daughter who was stuck on an ancient lampshade iMac.

I got a Lenovo Windows 7 laptop which is now my main desktop machine together with my somewhat contrary iMac which I like to call my iLemon.  When my Lenovo laptop became my main desktop machine, I did some research and a bought a Lenovo Yoga touch screen ultrabook running Windows 8.  I needed something to travel with besides my Kindle Fire

I’m at a bit of a loss to figure out what Microsoft wanted to accomplish with Windows 8 other than to drag many of its users screaming and kicking to a new world of touch interfaces.  It is not that Windows 8 doesn’t work well, it just works very differently, and I suspect many current Microsoft users are going to be reluctant to buy a laptop or desktop with such a radically different user interface.

Having said that I like my Lenovo Yoga.  It works well as a laptop and Windows 8 has not gotten in the way of it doing what I hoped it would do.  I’ve added a USB 3.0 external drive for photos, and I have also made a conscious effort to use the Microsoft tiles. So far I haven’t found enough utility to keep me going back to them regularly.

I have used the Lenovo Yoga some as a tablet, but I rarely need that much horsepower and screen real estate for my tablet needs which are generally confined to checking the weather and reading a few web articles.  Either my Kindle Fire or my new Nexus 7 can handle those jobs with ease.

There are some new backup features that I like in Windows 8. I also like the integration of Skydrive and even find the latest version of Internet Explorer much more usable.  However, none of this makes for a compelling reason to go out and buy Windows 8.  Windows 7 happened to be the most reliable operating system that I’ve ever used.

I haven’t noticed any issues with Windows 8, but I was pretty confused with it until I installed Start8 which made the transition much easier.  I’ll have a more detailed article on readwriteweb sometime soon, but so far I see no reason to go out and buy a Windows 8 machine unless you just need a new computer.

While my technology recommendations have often included the Macintosh, my recent experience with Apple has led me to hold back on suggesting someone go out and buy a Mac.  It might be time to start looking seriously at Linux once again.  My Dell Pentium 3 has been running Ubuntu for a number of years.  It has been trouble-free.

I keep my Mac around mostly for the video editing and simple production of DVDs that I do.