At the same time as having all this trouble with the Windows box I have been having a lot of trouble with my Vodem, which has been a backup device I have used during internet outages and at times when I needed to work around the filtering on the internet connection I have. Working around isn’t something I actually do a lot of and normally it is only happening when I need to use FTP as its port is blocked by filtering. The only time I use FTP these days is to maintain the NZ Rail Maps website at nzrailmaps.nz, which has an update backlog at present but is a low maintenance site in general. The vodem has basically stopped working properly. I don’t know why this is but when I took the SIM out of it and put that SIM into a spare phone there was no limitation on internet access. I have concluded therefore for being able to use this as a backup internet connection which is hopefully not too often but as I have a large data allowance on my mobile plan, is not too much of a struggle for occasional use. This will have to be achieved by tethering to the phone that has the SIM in it, and in practice either I use a plug in wireless adapter on a computer or a wireless bridge to connect to this new wireless network. Linux has this great advantage over Windows that there won’t be heaps of things running in the background that will suck up all your data when running on a metered connection that in this case looks like just another wireless network.
Windows sucks part 139
Well I have written numerous times about how bad Windows is but Microsoft just keeps on proving me correct over and over. Windows 10 is probably the worst version of Windows ever released, and that’s even without taking into account MS trying to force everyone to convert to it. I didn’t get my edition of Windows 10 as a free upgrade, I purchased a retail edition and paid full price for it (well, a discounted wholesale price but still fully valid). And it’s just so so obvious how MS has turned it into a big advertising and money grabbing platform and that is a huge shift from Windows 7 and even 8/8.1.
Now while Linux has its moments and is not totally perfect, compared to what MS has done with a huge paid team, the Linux community with its completely open source development process and hundreds or thousands of unpaid volumteers and a handful of paid developers has moved many mountains to produce something that in my view is every bit as good as Windows, in fact for many uses better, and all completely free of charge. And that is why it is the case that pretty soon, all four computers on my desk will be running Linux.
In the last year or so I went from having a brand new computer with 8 GB of RAM dedicated to Windows 10, to having the Antec E350 dedicated to Windows 10, to another desktop chassis with an E350 motherboard dedicated to Windows 10, and now Win10PC is about to go back onto that Antec E350 again and it will be the 5th computer and the only one that is not connected to the KVMs and actually sitting on this desk because I can remote control it via VNC from mainpc. So the computer will soon be off to one side and mounted under the side table that the musical keyboard sits on. It will still be used for a few things like software that I can’t be bothered trying to replace at the moment like Irfanview that is hard to run under WINE.
But we are getting so so so close to the point now that I could almost run Windows in a virtual machine because all of the hardware reasons I needed a Windows computer have largely fallen by the wayside.The single issue that has most torpedoed my faith in Windows 10 in the last few months has been over USB connection issues. I have several digital cameras and phones that I try to connect to the Windows 10 computer to upload music or download photos. The problem with downloading in particular is endless and nonsensical interruptions and error messages that we just never used to see in Windows 7. So the latest indignity was trying to download photos from my Galaxy J2 and the messages about data being in the wrong format or the device attached to the system has stopped functioning and so forth. When it was my EOS M100 camera it woud keep interrupting downloads especially large videos that would never complete, they would stop after 5 minutes.
If I plug these devices into mainpc I can get the stuff straight off them, not only is it a lot faster to download but there are no silly errors. There is still however one puzzle that is the Nexus 5X that I have not been able to get to connect to anything however. About the best I can possibly hope for is that it might be possible to download a few files at a time using Bluetooth. So that is where I stand at the moment with the Windows 10 computer, that its boot disk will soon be ghosted back onto the Antec with its laptop hard drives and become something that really only gets switched on quite occasionally.
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