Why are some people so tight when it comes to car maintainance and repair?

General Discussion
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Windows 8 is a great and efficient OS if you disable the stock interface. I don’t know what kind of crack the person who designed the interface at Microsoft was on when they designed it but there is a reason PC sales have been falling like a rock since the release of Windows 8! The stock interface is almost unusable to most people and I find it takes myself much longer to navigate through the system. That being said, the under the hood parts of the OS are stable, reliable, and efficient. It is based on Windows 7 with a few tweaks. I am personally running Windows 8 with a third party patch to make it look just like the Windows 7 interface.

Windows Vista looked basically just like Windows 7. Windows 7 is the “fixed” version of Vista if you want to look at it that way. Vista wasn’t too bad by the end but the damage was done and it did take a pretty powerful computer for it to run decent. Microsoft has also set minimum standards

If it wasn’t possible to “fix” Windows 8, I would probably have put off any purchases until the situation was sorted out or I decided to make the switch to Apple. Windows 8 is optimized around new hardware such as SSDs and Intel i series processors so I did notice a pretty remarkable speed increase when upgrading a Windows 7 computer to 8.

They are releasing Windows “blue” or Windows 8.1 to fix all the issues with stock 8. Maybe this will turn things around for others.

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Windows 8 is a great and efficient OS if you disable the stock interface. I don't know what kind of crack the person who designed the interface at Microsoft was on when they designed it but there is a reason PC sales have been falling like a rock since the release of Windows 8!

The release of Windows 8 has almost nothing to do with why PC sales are down. Things like IPad and notebooks that can surf the net are the biggest reasons. Most people buy a PC to get in the net and run a few programs like word or excel. You don’t need a PC for that. The cost of the tablets is much cheaper and gives you far more then what most people need…especially with all the built in apps.

The windows 8 operating system is much like Sharepoint Webparts. Look it up and you’ll see what I mean.

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Yeah, tablets and such have added to the decline but I don’t think it would have been quite as steep if it wasn’t for the horrid Windows 8 interface. Either way, MS had better reinvent itself and soon.

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Great,glad to hear MS is starting to pay attention to the consumer.XP wasnt glamorous but I sure liked it-Kevin

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I can tell you from experience, rust is not just attributed to salt areas. When my 78 Subaru had reached it’s 5 th year of life, I received a call from my cousin who was the service manager of the Subaru dealership to come over and pick up a coupke of new fenders. When I told him my car wasn’t rusting, he said…," it will and you need these ready" Sure enough, less then a year later, the bubbles began to appear. Upon replacement, I discovered non closed cell foam cushioning under the fender mounts that seemed " designed" to cause rust. A little butyl rubber caulking instead and I had a finnished job designed to last much longer then factory. “Planned obsolecence” was alive and well in early Japonese cars…and still is today with ALL CARS.

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I work in IT for a living (I’m a network admin by trade), but I’ve been building my own computers for the past 20 years or so. There are very few retail desktop computers worth buying IMHO. The only ones I would consider buying would be from the likes of Falcon Northwest, or Velocity Micro and those are overpriced vs. building your own. The mass market Dells, HPs etc use exceedingly cheap components, especially the mobos and PSUs. Many of them with SFF cases still uses proprietary PSUs, which severely limits upgrade potential, and makes replacement parts pretty expensive for what you get.

For laptops I tend to favor Toshiba and Lenovo. I recently picked up a Lenovo Y500, (Ivy Bridge i5, 8 GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 16GB SSD, and a pair o GeForcef GT 650m’s in SLI) for a very reasonable $900. I did put Win7 on it place of Win8) So far it’s been great, battery life isn’t even that bad considering the dual discrete video cards.

Since I am a PC gaming enthusiast, I tend to build a new gaming rig every 3 years or so. I’m currently using a Sandy Bridge i5-2500k ( quad core, 4.5 Ghz) based rig. It’s about 2 and half years old now. I was going to do a Haswell build when that came out, but the performance difference isn’t large enough IMHO to justify the cost of a new build. So I may sit out LGA 1150, and wait until Skylake comes out for my next build. And just do some incremental updates to my current machine .

I don’t tolerate slow computers that well, even my work computer (HP 6005 Pro) has been outfitted by me for better performance, I swapped out the pitiful stock Athlon II X2 230 for a Phenom II X B99, I added another stick of RAM (we still use WinXP 32 bit at work, so 3 GB is limit with discrete video card), and I put in a low profile Radeon 6570 video card to replace the crap integrated video. And I fitted a 45 GB SSD cache drive. I’m supposed to be getting a new work computer this summer, it will be a FM2-based machine, and I’m sure they didn’t spring for the A8/A10 quad core CPU, so I’m probably going to replace the A4/A6 with one of those right off the bat, and I’ll transplant the SSD and discrete video card from my old work computer into the new one, and since the AMD APU’s seem to be quite sensitive to RAM speed, I probably end up replace the stock DDR3-1600 with some DDR3-2133 RAM.

Also I will say that Thermaltake PSU’s are pretty much crap unless you get their toughpower line. For PSUs, Corsair, Enermax, Silverstone, and PC Power & Cooling are your top tier manufactures. XFX and the higher end Antecs aren’t bad either. Thermaltake does make some interesting cases, but they wouldn’t be my first choice in PSUs.

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Ok, since all of the computer pros are on board, I don’t understand hardly a word said and I used to consider myself pretty savvy.

Since my computer guy moved out of town, I’ve been holding my breath on computer/software issues. I use Mozzila Thunderbird for Email and it has been wanting me to upgrade to the new version for quite a while. I’m afraid to push the button though since I’m not sure if it would still maintain my POP settings and so on. If I upgrade, will it just save all my settings and everything or would I have to call someone in again to get my Email back up?

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For a second, I thought this was PC Talk not Car Talk. You guys should get a room…
:wink: