Bought a new computer over the weekend, but before I retired the old one I tried a few things on it to see what they were like. Here are are my impressions of both experiences...
Browsers
On the old machine I tried a few browsers to see how they worked and also what the download experience was like. The result was a mixed bag:-
Internet Explorer - comes installed so left this alone
Chrome - had this installed already so uninstalled and went to the website and downloaded again - went through fine. The thing with Chrome though, is it isn't that good. Much overrated.
Opera - uninstalled and installed again, went through fine, Opera is better than the above two in my opinion - with reservations (more about that later).
Avant - tried the lite version which runs on the trident engine ( IE ), the damn thing imported all my bookmarks from IE and installed itself as the default browser. OK, so promptly uninstall that nonsense.
Then tried rekonq. Oh dear, got badly infected by this, took several hours of Malwarebytes, AdwCleaner and Hitman Pro to get rid of nasties like Search Protect.
Conclusions: when buying a new computer ignore Avant and rekonq, stick with the mainstream. Didn't have time to try Maxthon and others - was this your plan rekonq ? hmmmm?
Went to Noel Leeming, bought the Hp 15 G205AU 4 Gig RAM $499
Out of the box it starts OK.
First impressions after set up, what's all this shit preloaded? An endless list of things I can spend money on? At least I didn't notice Office 2013 with this shit ( bought at the same time ). At some point I'll be getting rid of all this advertising. IE11 for instance comes with booking,com and trip advisor displayed on a toolbar at the top. Then other stuff on the start screen.
Note to equipment manufacturers and software companies - I just forked out cash, I'm not interesting in your offerings.
Installed, Chrome and Opera. Actually I sorta installed Chrome as it was bundled with Avast, Note to self, uninstall Avast and replace with AVG which doesn't do shit like that.
Critical performance issue - how do Flash videos play with this new machine? Result IE11 is the clear winner, clarity and frame rate are excellent with a broadband connection. Chrome is so-so. Opera better but a little jerky. Fiddled around with settings and no real improvement.
Setting up computer to go straight through to desktop wasn't that hard, plenty of links describing how to do this, such as....
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043243/how-to-boot-to-desktop-mode-in-windows-8-1.html
In windows 8.1 you can set some interesting themes:-
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-NZ/windows/themes
McAfee pre-installed and acts a bit like a virus, will uninstall when the trial period runs out. Uninstall avast which behaves a bit like a virus and I think caused the computer to crash while writing this!! Seems things run slow with McAfee in the way.
Office 2013 Word - Calibri font changed to default Times New Roman 12pt and I removed spacing between paragraphs.
Is Windows 8.1 better? A bit faster but also harder to find things, while other things easier, for instance to disable items at startup, right click task bar and go to task manager, no need to msconfig any longer.
DNS server addresses may have to be manually inserted, I had to from where I live, obtaining that DNS address automatically can be challenging, how to do it in 8.1....
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/fl/change-dns-servers-windows-8.htm
The HP15 keyboard is taking a bit of getting used to, not as good as the old HP. The screen is wider and maybe pages display better, nothing in it compared to the old HP.
No comments:
Post a Comment