Tetge wrote:jhwalker wrote:.....My credit card solves many of those problems..........
I am not quite sure how a credit card helps? Perhaps you are saying that you can simply purchase a new desk top, or laptop, or whatever you might consider a computer and that it would come all configured? But, it would take me weeks to clean up any of the current commercially available computers as they tend to have bloat ware and activated free trials of other nasty software, such as anything from Symantec. And, these days they come with W8.1, which I despise.
I also realize that many now use smart phones and tablets and that desk top computers may no longer be necessary. But, I need a giant monitor (I keep watching for a larger one that the 27" one that I currently have) as I am blind. And, I need to use a wired mouse, or I am not happy. I also need a real keyboard as my fat, numb, fingers, can not handle touch screen stuff.
So, I still build, configure, and maintain all my computers, and I couldn't pay to have that done, as I have my own ideas about how things should look and feel, and, in my case, that means that if I could have been transported in time from when I was using Windows 3.0 or 3.1 for workgroups, the desktop on that ancient computer would have matched the one on my current computer, both in Linux Mint and Windows 7. And, by the time Win95 came out, it was even a lot the same under the hood, although there were still some DOS related things that needed to be addressed until W2000.
But, for those that can adapt and those that are fans of touch screens, I suppose that buying a new device could solve any issues with the old one.
You are doing things with computers that I don't do. Every computer I have bought in the past 10 years, including my current Surface Pro 2, was running perfectly (for my needs) within 2 hours of getting home with it. I run NO old software, and don't care about the placement of things on the screen. I do hold off on a clearly bad release. I use email, Word, Excel, some photo stuff, Skype, Acrobat. Soon I will try to process a GoPro vid on the Surface -- hope it works... Moving to a touch pad a couple of years ago, and now a stylus pen on the Surface is fun for me. I am actually very fond of the Surface Pro 2, and carry it around with me in my backpack in town, as its ability to find connections is very good. I like the swipe areas, the touch points. I never got into tinkering with computers or PC software, since the technical support department that I was in charge of for the last 10 years that I worked was responsible for consistency of operation of maybe 3 thousand computers scattered around 100+ locations across the country and at home office, and locking down the software on them so our new application releases would run with no human involvement was a key to our company success -- since we thrived by being better than our competitors. Having screwed with computers since 1967 (vacuum tubes then), computers have always simply been a means to an end for me. I don't play computer games. But I admire those of you who did dig in and know all of that stuff you know. Perhaps a bit envious, but not sure what I would have had to give up to do that. I was always an "understand the business, design solutions, design databases, write software" guy in an era that let us do that stuff, never a hardware guy -- but seemed to have luck in finding good hardware guys.