Windows, Apple and Linux

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were genius's, but both had their flaws. Bill Gates made Windows, a wonderful graphical interface for computers, which opened the way for ordinary people to use computers without having to learn some basic commands to type in to get the computer running the programme they wanted to work. His flaw was that although the human race had gone from no flight to space flight in 60 years and from computers that took up a whole room, to one that could site on your desk, he did not have the foresight to realise that computer internal memory would not be restricted as he allowed for, which in later versions of Windows did cause some problems. Microsoft build some great interfaces for normal users, 3.11, XP, were two great examples of stable clear systems, then we had 95 and Vista, which to me were absolute crap. We now have Windows 7 a good replacement for XP, relatively stable, but then we now have Windows 8, to me this is what I call 'prettyware' no better than Windows 7, just made to appease. I have no intention of going touch screen as long as possible, the skin produces oil to protect itself, hence smudges on your screen, I do not want to have to clean my screen every few minutes because the light has caught fingerprints all over my screen.

Steve Jobs, the other genius made another glaring error which is being continued by his company. He could have made his Operating System available to ordinary PC users, instead it could only be supplied for those who had an Apple computer. When Apple changed to the Intel chipset this was the ideal opportunity to come into direct competition with Microsoft, but for some reason they have stuck with their policy. There was a second mistake, they have priced Apple computers beyond the reach of ordinary users. Yes they are pieces of art to look at, but I can get three laptops with high specifications for one Apple Airbook!

I used to use Windows as my main operating system, but over the past 6 weeks I have been using Ubuntu a Linux based Operating System almost exclusively. 12.04.02 has five year support and is extremely stable and extremely fast, loading in about 30 seconds compared to Windows taking up to two minutes. Almost all the software is free of charge and I have found only one thing I can do in Windows that I cannot do in Linux, and that is a real thought provoker. Tom Tom use Linux on their devices, but only provide Tom Tom Home for Windows or Mac's, how about that!

I am finding that more and more people are trying Linux and loving the experience. If you need help just type in your problem to your search engine and there are huge amounts of forums to help you out. It does take a bit of an effort to get used to certain things, like using the terminal, but you can get the help with the right syntax which you can copy and paste.

I predict that like the UKIP party in the UK people are fed up with bloatware in software, just as much as they are fed up with politicians who are full of bloatware, hence UKIP is growing in popularity at an extraordinary rate, so to is Linux. Itunes is a very good example of bloatware to me, I have an Ipod classic 160GB I just want to be able to drag and drop files onto the ipod, and I hate Itunes. I have found there are several lightweight programs such as Media Monkey or Winamp which are free, small and do what I want easily.

You do not have to load Ubuntu to try it, get a live cd from Ubuntu by downloading the Iso file, burn the cd then boot with the cd in the drive, you can use Ubuntu or many other Linux systems without making changes to your computer, just to get a feel of it. If you want both Linux and Windows it will also allow for a dual boot called a Grub loader to be installed which gives the option of which OS to boot into.

Dell - Going Backwards?

I have, for years, been a happy customer at Dell.com. My wife has a Dell laptop I helped her to customise for her personal needs, I helped my daughter customise a powerful desktop to meet her needs as an illustrator, I have a now aging Inspiron 1525 which I am seriously thinking of upgrading, so my first port of call was the Dell website.

I was horrified, you are no longer able to customise laptops to your budget and needs and meet that happy medium of getting the best within your budget. Dell have fallen into the corporate trap! By this I mean I went onto their chat with an advisor, and was given what I can only conclude was the company line, helpful and polite but useless.

I then got a phone call from Dell, again a nice person with an Indian accent. Now I am far from racist, but I instantly thought of The Big Bang Theory where poor Raj, who tries his hardest and is nice a person as possible, makes so many mistakes because of the nuances native English speakers understand.

Again I appeared to be fed the company line. We have listened to our customers and we have speeded up our delivery time by ready made laptops. Not what I want I said politely, I want to be able to choose options, such as CPU, colour, storage, ram etc. We have lots of options was the reply, yes but I want to choose options for myself I said, well to cut a long story down, I ended up thanking the nice person on the phone and stated I would look elsewhere, as he had stated that everyone now does this.

Within 5 minutes of searching I found that Sony allow customisable laptops, Novatech in the UK also have a good reputation and will help you, and System 76 have some stunning laptops each one customisable as Dell used to be.

Dell have made a mistake only a novice marketing manager could make and will loose a small group of customers because of this. I do say small as geeky people like me are in the minority of wanting to customise their laptops, but any loss of custom should be avoided at all cost.

If Dell had kept a small section of the site for people like me (remember I am a returning customer) so I can play with various configurations to get the compromise to suit my budget. Another thing I noticed was that there is no complaint tab either at the top or the bottom of the screen, are they that good?

Did them no good though as Twitter and a quick search got me the email and Twitter address of Michael Bell (CEO and founder) so I hope he reads this blog. I am a manager, if I was to loose even one customer, I quite rightly get the third degree from my employer, why? How can this be avoided? What did I personally do to try and not loose this customer? As many who read my blogs (really not that many!) you know that I work in the service industry as a care home manager where income is extremely important, so is matching the care to each individual.

Mr Dell should seriously look at what has gone wrong and why customers like myself will now be looking elsewhere. My preference is System 76 as the way that you can make your laptop your own is very similar to the way Dell once were.