The joys of operating systems

I’ve had my moments with Big Tech. Back in the day I fell in love with the Macintosh. Remember them? Little box, tiny screen in black and white, made by Apple. But it had this amazing operating system. I never bought one, just played with it at work to do graphics.

The Dark Side

I’ve had Windows machines for… ever. The first one was the IBM XT. It ran Microsoft DOS, a trim little operating system (OS ) which remained the basis for Windows for many years and still lurks down there if you know where to look. The machine had 128kb of RAM and a 10MB hard drive. I mean, what could anybody do with 10MB of storage? That was huge. Nowadays that’s enough for about half a raw image file. It had a green screen but the colour screen could do four(4) colour graphics. Wow.

Anyway, Windows did what Windows does and we went through the operating systems, progressively driving everybody nuts with useless interface redesigns and bloody silly paperclips and the like. Win 3 was so-so, Win 4 was horrible, Win 5 (based on the NT system) was great. Am I bringing back memories? Win 7 was a stable winner. Then there was the awful Win 8… and I think that’s when I thought, ‘bugger it, I’ll get a Mac’.

The Mac

It was a grown-up Macintosh with a big screen and colour and everything. It was especially good at graphics and Mac is still the preferred machine for artists. I had to unlearn a few things and learn a few others but the Mac and I got along reasonably well. For editing images in particular. But the Mac OS is opaque. Having worked in IT since before the first IBM PC arrived, I knew enough about Microsoft’s OS to be able to poke around and fix things. You can’t do that in Apple’s systems. You have zero control. And when they ‘updated’ an app I’d purchased and significantly dumbed it down with no recourse, I’d had enough and returned to the Dark Side.

I sold the Mac and went back to Windows.

And there I’ve been ever since. The thing is, it’s nice to have a smaller device than a PC for taking overseas and such. Android has virtually cornered the tablet market, so after a brief foray with a Lenovo Windows laptop that doesn’t bear talking about, I bought a Samsung tablet.

Android

Those of us with Android phones have had to learn to live with Android. I’m not one of those people who has the phone virtually connected to my person. It spends most of its time on my desk. I can kind of work my way around things when I’m asked questions, seeing as how I’m the local IT manager but I’m no expert. Phone to PC works for uploading photos and so on. But you’re not talking folders and book manuscripts and Photoshop and stuff. And it’s very important to me that my tablet/laptop speaks fluently to my PC.

Breaking point was when I uploaded photos from my phone to my tablet – and couldn’t find them on the machine. They weren’t in the gallery but they were there somewhere. Oh – and Android had created this cute little security gotcha that EVERY TIME you wanted to upload stuff from Android to another machine you had to tell the machine that the USB was allowed to do that. (I found a workaround that required me to go into Android developer mode (for goodness sake) to install a permanent setting). I’d had enough and returned to the Dark Side.

I’ve bought a Surface Pro that has automatically synched most of my files and settings from my PC. Bliss.

But Android wasn’t finished with me yet.

The Samsung tablet was quite new and Pete’s tablet is looking a bit sad so he would inherit my tablet. He doesn’t have my hangups with Android. He uses his tablet to read books and take pictures. If he has a problem he asks the IT manager (sigh). This meant I had to reset my tablet for a new owner. That’s not as straightforward as anyone would think. I got instructions from ChatGPT and removed accounts etc before pressing the reset button. The machine did its thing. When it finally rebooted, the instructions were in Chinese.

Really, that’s a serious ‘oh shit’ moment. I pressed a few buttons, hoping this was all a horrible joke and the OS would come good. It didn’t. A Chinese lady spoke to me, telling me to do who-knew-what?

This is where all those years of IT support kicked in. Panic is not an option. Not a useful one, anyway. What could I do? Turning off and turning back on wasn’t going to help. Fortunately, I have an excellent relationship with ChatGPT. I took a picture of the screen and loaded it to the AI which speaks fluent Mandarin. First, I had to turn off the voice instructions and get back to the welcome screen. Then, Chatty explained, there’s a little down arrow on the text box that lets you choose a language. See it there?

Phew.

But honestly, it should not have come to that. The elves at Android need to stop fiddling with the OS and make sure it works for people.

So there you have it. How was your week?