I should never have started
I had to visit the eye clinic yesterday.
Nothing new there. I didn’t get lost and my eyes are fine. I just have to keep taking the drops [fuck!] and have two new appointments to return in six months and a year. It’s nice that they are confident I will still be around then?
Anyways on the journey I had the SatNav running. It’s mainly used for keeping an accurate speed check and also as a hands-free for my phone. I think I know my way by now.
A minute into my journey a notice obliterated my screen saying some software badly needed updating. No surprise there as I hadn’t updated it in ages. I got rid of the notice and carried on. So today I decided to update the software.
I should have known better.
Now Garmin, in their infinite wisdom only support Windoze or Mac. Also they throttle their connections so any downloads are at dial-up speeds. Because I don’t want to tie this machine up for 24 hours [or more] I decided to use my old stand-by emergency machine – a Packard Bell – which has a dead keyboard and battery.
I fired it up. First problem. No operating system. Fuck!
I removed it from under the junk in the back room and set it up in the comfort of my armchair.
I fired it up. It actually booted up this time so I told it to run Windoze. It happily loaded Windoze 7 so I told the browser to connect to Garmin. No Interweb connection. Fuck!
I decided to connect it to the Interweb using cable as the wireless seemed a bit iffy. I had to do some tweaks to the settings [I hadn’t used it since I got fibre] but it connected.
Of course all this time I was having to kill little notices telling me that this that or the other was outdated and offering to update everything. Fucking irritating. I closed them all.
I opened the Garmin site. My password wouldn’t work! I managed to reset that and got into their back-end site where I get updates and all that malarkey. They told me I needed to download their software so the SatNav could talk to their server. This is the stage that can’t be done in Linux, the bastards. I downloaded it
I ran their little program. It failed but gave no reason whatsoever. I downloaded it again just to be sure. Same result. It will not run for love nor money and still gives no reason.
I decided that maybe Windoze wasn’t quite up to date enough for it and maybe there was one of those Service Pack fuckers missing. I went into Windoze Update. 43 updates and God knows how many gigabytes. Fuck!
I decided to install them anyway as at least I can leave the old machine to run along in the background.
It’s sitting there. “Downloading 43 Updates (0 KB total, 0% complete)”. It is doing sweet fuck all apart from a little green slidey thing showing me a progress that doesn’t exist.
God I hate Windoze!
I have come to the conclusion that Linux has almost as many flaws as Windows and that its only saving grace is that it isn’t Windows. Haven’t updated my mint in ages because I refuse to give it a note from my mom and everytime I did let it install an update, something else ceased to work. Its annoying because when I first installed it (with no little help from Grandad) it ran like greased weasel shit (that’s a ‘good thing’) and things like USBs, which had never worked under windows, suddenly sat up and begged for input (oooh ahh). NOw it won’t even play some mp4s or only badly.
I must have been particularly wicked in a past life…
Git on outa that! There is no comparison between the two. I just rebooted my spare machine and I was able to brew a mug of tea in the time it took to shut down Windoze. I booted into Linux which also had a ton of updates. Three minutes later all was done and ready [and I could have carried on working if I had so desired].
Some makes of machine do have small problems with Linux. I have used Acer [the one I use now], Toshiba and Packard Bell with no problems whatsoever. All drivers loaded correctly during install and all worked perfectly. On the other hand, I got an HP notebook for Herself and I did have problems getting the wireless and a few other things working. Even now it has a bug where the screen flickers briefly at regular intervals which I find very irritating, but Herself hasn’t noticed so all is well.
You were definitely wicked …
”s far as I know, the Softies have stopped support for Win7 altogether – maybe that’s the reason your machiny thing isn’t making any progress?
Windows 7 is actually supported (bug and security fixes) to January of 2020 so there’s a bit of time still left. That means I have to keep updating The Wife’s Windows 7 Pro install for 2 more years yet (ugh).
Not that this has any real bearing on your post, GD, but I finally installed Mint 19.1/Cinnamon beta on my old Thinkpad T430 laptop. Excellent.
Still no problems at this end. I like it.
Where’s Roger?
He has been demoted to SatNav.
Still on slitaz here. I can start it up enter password close it down in less time that it takes mint to load. Although I accept it is not functional enough for a superuser like yerself but for this keyboard jockey tis perfect.
It’s really a case of horses for courses. The reason I go for Mint is that it really is an equivalent to Windoze in that I can perform all tasks [bar one or two, like Garmin] without the incessant annoyances of the latter.
Appositely this morning I tried to save off all the recent Grandchildreness off my phone to my laptop (and then to send it via the cloud to their adoring family members elsewhere ). Back when Grandad helped me install Mint I recall raving to him about just how fast my laptop not only read the files on my phone’s SD but also transferred them to the laptop…far far faster than windows.
Now mint won’t even detect my phone (and yes , I have checked the cable and the phone etc). lsusb and ls /dev/ | grep sd confirm that it is not even detecting it , let alone mounting it. And I can’t plug in my copy of Slitaz (ooh vicar) and do it that way cos that’s on a stix too. So I shall have to boot into Doze and wait….and wait….and wait. Windows is a bit like my car, it won’t win any races but it will finish every race.
Assuming it’s the same laptop then that is weird. Have you tried a web-search with the symptoms? When I got the HP bugger it wouldn’t detect a lot of stuff including the wireless. Luckily Ethernet worked so I was able to download about six different drivers before it worked properly.
Windoze is more like a car that insists on restarting the race at random times and rarely crosses the finishing line.
The answer lies in bios setting young man. You might not have changed them but gremlins aka software is a bugger.
Interesting suggestion, I admit I hadn’t even the bios any thought whatsoever, so thanks for that. I shall investigate.