Posts Tagged ‘windows’

Mac vs. PC: How Well Does It Age?

Yesterday I took a look at a ridiculous study sponsored by Microsoft which supposedly showed how PCs had a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Macs. The study was completely unfair towards the Mac, but there’s another factor that wasn’t taken into consideration either: how well the computers held their value when they aged. The writer of the study assumed that the PC and the Mac could be useful for 5 years before being replaced. However, do Macs and PCs age just as well?

It only took me a few minutes to think about 5 year-old machines that I and others that I know use. Five years ago, I started college and was issued a Gateway M275 laptop. The laptop is a tablet PC and at the time its retail value was estimated at $1600. The laptop now is somewhat usable, though it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Most of my problems with it are cosmetic, though the hard drive and processor speed is pretty limiting. It runs Windows XP all right, and the lighter Linux distros pretty good.

I also have a friend who owns an iBook G4, which was made around the same era. One can track this via MacTracker, and the value of the machine when it was made in early 2004 was $1099. The laptop runs OS X Tiger, which is a release newer than the OS that it originally shipped with, unlike the PC. The laptop does plenty for what this person needs to be able to do.

While both do fairly well for really basic tasks like e-mail, web browsing, etc., the resale value of these computers is drastically different and a factor in calculating the TCO of the computers. The best price I could find for a used Gateway M275 was on eBay with a “Buy it now” price of $225. For an iBook G4, a used iBook G4 at 800Mhz on Amazon, the same as the 2004 model, at a price of $357. That’s 14% of the original retail value of the PC and 32% the original price of the Mac. That has to be taken with a grain of salt, since I’m comparing only two very specific models, but it does seem to be the trend that older Macs are worth much more at resell time than older PCs. While the cause of the drop in value could very well be a much larger supply of used PCs, the reality is that the value seems to be higher.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 16th, 2009

Conflicker is Alive

The makers of Conflicker or no longer April-foolin’ around. The virus spread around for months using a Microsoft vulnerability in Windows that was patched in October, but was idle until April 1. On that April 1 date, the virus started retrieving instructions from the makers, turning any machine infected into member of a giant botnet. It has been estimated that over 12 million PCs have been infected so far. At first, the virus did nothing. Now, it’s been reported that the virus is active and downloading payloads.

A lot of speculation went into what the makers’ intent for the virus was. It appears that we know their intent – for now. The virus is spreading fake pay-for software tricking users into buying fake antivirus software and other assorted fake to make money.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Apr 12th, 2009

Windows Automatic Reboots After Update

All right all you Linux haters, listen up. You no longer have the right to tell me that Linux is hard to use because you have to drop to a command line to do “simple tasks”. I was working in a Windows XP virtual machine today and had the machine automatically reboot due to some updates being installed. I was in the middle of a project and was flipping back and forth. At one point I didn’t go back into my Windows session for some time and just as I got there I saw the dialog box go away wondering if I wanted to reboot. Ugh. I just missed it. So.. here I am. Working on a project, changing nothing when the OS just decided “it’s okay, I’ll just reboot now, he won’t know”. Except I did. The one thing that I hate about virtual machines is you can’t kick them without affecting others. Okay, so maybe I won’t kick my machines, but seriously.. it can’t just stay on?

When the machine came back up I decided to turn that “feature” off. After all, Windows is so much easier to configure, right? I couldn’t find anything in the “Automatic Updates” configuration, so I hit Google. I found this page on how to disable the automatic reboots and prompts. The post is quite old but so far I haven’t found any newer solutions (I was using XP, not sure how Vista handles this) and there are comments dating up until 2008. Looks like one can either stop the Windows Update service and modify the group policy or change a registry setting. Really? Just to keep my computer from shutting off in the middle of a project, I have to modify the registry or change the group policy? Now, I’ll admit, things are harder than they should be in every OS (yes, including Linux and Mac and many others), but I want to hear nothing about how Windows is so much easier to accomplish simple tasks. Like, you know.. staying on..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 22nd, 2009

Why Patching Is Important..

The Telegraph reports that security researchers are saying over 8.9 million computers have been infected by a virus in the past two weeks which uses a vulnerability that had been patched by Microsoft months ago. Users have not patched their machines and it is allowing the virus to spread at a rapid rate. The virus spreads through a vulnerability in the Windows server service so it can spread across a LAN and will also use portable storage such as USB flash drives to travel from LAN to LAN. It has been called Conficker, Kido and Downadup and is said to be very difficult to get rid of. If you haven’t updated Windows since the end of October, please take the time to do so now. If you’re not infected already and haven’t patched, consider this your warning. Take the time right now to run your updated (no matter what OS you happen to run). Next to backup, this is one of the biggest things users look back upon and wonder why they didn’t take time before it became a problem.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jan 20th, 2009

Uptime In Windows

One of the many things that has annoyed me about Windows is the lack of an “uptime” utility like UNIX or Linux machines. There are a lot of scenarios where I need to find out quickly the last time the system had been rebooting without having to grep through logs.. err.. scroll through the Event Viewer. One trick that I picked up recently was that the systeminfo utility will tell you the uptime and you can parse out all the extra junk. I know this tip works on Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP, but I don’t have access to a lot of other Windows platforms (and didn’t bother checking earlier ones). You can simply run from a command prompt: systeminfo | find “Up Time”.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (1) : Dec 11th, 2008

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