The Decline and Fall of Tech

I’ve posted before on why I believe that Apple, despite some ongoing technical inertia from their glory days, is slipping.

I’ve also said that it’s not like any of their windows based competitors are actually “getting better”, for the most part.

Take Microsoft.

…

What, you thought I’d follow with the obvious “please”?

For most people, including myself, the fall creator’s update has been smooth. For others, including one guy I’ve helped, not so much.

Brand new computer, mid to high end Lenovo workstation with solid state drives. Nothing installed except print drivers , MS Office, and one niche app related to his business, and Windows, often while using Outlook, simply freezes. Not a blue screen typical of driver or memory issues, just stops responding outside of letting you move the cursor. You cannot shift to another app via mouse or keyboard, neither responds. The only solution is a hard shutdown via holding the power button.

Yes, drivers are up to date, via Lenovo and also further via Nvidia directly for the graphics card. Ditto print drivers. Everything has been stripped off, and even windows has been reinstalled. Build in diagnostics find nothing.

It only affects a small percentage of people, yet it persists.

Also, a recent security update suddenly disabled USB keyboards and mice. Not the USB ports overall – thumb drives and printers still work – just human interface devices. The drivers fail to load properly. Fortunately, on laptops, the builtin keyboards and mice work, but if you’re on a desktop and don’t have PS2 ports and peripherals, or haven’t setup Logmein, Teamviewer, Remote Desktop, or the like, you’re screwed. It predominantly affects HP’s and Dells but I’ve run into four in the last two weeks. The solution, without fail, is to remove that security update, then block it from reinstalling.

Oh, did I mention that you can no longer do that from the default windows update controls, but have to download a special Microsoft utility to do the job?

At this rate, desktop linux can seemingly afford to deal with it’s own convergence issues in various projects a bit because it’s at least, for now, getting better, and the slippage of MS and Apple will make Linux appear better even faster.