May
11
services don’t stop when instructed — what happened to a kernel able to force things to quit? Who’s the boss on the system?
Venting: My Dell is Great!
I've used OSX for five years, and had a near-flawless experience (it failed once when my drive died). My Powerbook-G4 is five years old, and has dust from 9 countries (AU, CA, CN, GB, HK, ID, JP, KR, TH) in it. I reboot when the update makes me, and I've had to purchase very few additional components (such as virus checkers, SSH tools, email products, etc).
The Dell build quality, OS quality, integration, and general user-experience would not be so bad if I had not been using a Mac. I would have assumed that every PC did this, but now it highlights what's possible but obviously beyond the reach of Dell and Microsoft, even five years old.
This tumblr is merely to track the little things I need to do every day to get the Dell to work.
Apr
17
Outlook Choke/segfault/Restart
Double-clicking my 11:00 appt to edit/resched choked and killed Outlook, killing calendar, mail, and contacts. Let’s see what was preserved.
Apr
15
Reboot: Sloth (Envy is Next)
15-20 seconds to close a dialog again. Sloooooooow. App switching is un-stellar, takes a long time. I’m reboot-happy today.
Reboot due to Internal Confusion
The Dell has forgotten that clicking on a “close” box means to close an app, and selecting an app activates it. Reboot!
Reboot: Only Way to Free Up Resources
Dell takes 15 seconds to close a dialog — that’s closing a dialog without making a change, saving content, or anything. Other systems can shutdown completely in 1/5 that time. Since there’s no method of completely dropping resident Segment Memory held by an app, there’s one action left: Reboot!
Apr
9
Hang: Left alone too long
Had to reboot (as always, using a long-press on the power button) after I left the Dell alone for 20 min to make a call. Outlook, firefox were up, but the Dell had gone to standby while connected to power. No idea what caused it, but returning from standby hung before i had the keyboard up.
This might be related to my habit of hitting caps-lock to watch for a flickering light to tell me when the Dell has come back (Mac takes 2-3 seconds after opening the cover before it’s usable, from full sleep, so even 10 seconds seems like 3x too long).
All work lost, but at least it was near the start of the day.
Another Reboot
This reboot was a case of letting the Dell sleep while connected to power (hibernate deactivated), then waking it, logging in, and have it never ever show signs of having a keyboard connected, although the trackpad works until it re-activates the bluetooth stack. I’m not sure why it re-activates, since the bluetooth mouse works fine until it (re)starts bluetooth. This kinda feels like when your car is running, you hit the starter motor, it grinds, you blush, except rather than driving away with a shy chuckle, the car’s tires explode.
Apr
6
Quality == the opposite of rebooting
Outlook hang: Ctrl-1 and Ctrl-2 no longer change from mail to calendar, and magic left pane no longer updating. This was broken by scheduling a meeting — which is a rare (?) thing for a calendar app to do I guess.
Apr
3
random reboot — but the Dell guy yesterday improved the reboot speed, so it’s not so bad.
← Older posts
Page 1 of 4
