The_Brown_Hornet
John Eales (66)
Will do. We've had enough of Exchange and its quirks. We had Groupwise before I joined the company and it worked a lot better, but it got replaced with Exchange for political reasons.
Mac vs Windows
- Thread starter Hugh Jarse
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Schadenfreude
John Solomon (38)
How many users do you have and how much cash/time have you got to be rebuilding your email infrastructure 3 times?
The_Brown_Hornet
John Eales (66)
We're talking a period of 8 years here. We've had Exchange for five. The user base numbers around 600.
I prefer Mac's as they are pretty simple to use and I'm not very technically savvy.
I've had a couple of ipods replaced and it was pretty easy as it was in the warranty period.
My problem with iPhones has been that I keep smashing screens but my wife tells me that its an operator issue.
I've had a couple of ipods replaced and it was pretty easy as it was in the warranty period.
My problem with iPhones has been that I keep smashing screens but my wife tells me that its an operator issue.
I get the shits when I have to talk to the operator too.
Pfitzy
George Gregan (70)
Work is moving to Google. Chrome boxes for everyone! Except me, until they get me a decent solution for running databases.
Anyhow, the good point was made above - apple products are expensive, but they run well and their design is top notch. You get what you pay for, in effect. The fact that it's way too much, and their scope is so limited, and their user access is draconian, is up to the consumer to come to terms with.
I use Windows and android at home, because I'm a techie and like to actually pull things apart and know how they work, rather than just have it tell me how to do stuff all the time. Mac has never appealed, except for video editing, which I do rarely these days.
People who get frustrated with Windows are usually the type who will install random shit like search toolbars and fkn awful antivirus systems because they have no idea what they're doing. Such people are perfectly happy in the Apple play pen, and in the belief that macs don't get viruses...
I think Windows 7 is pretty bloody good actually, and anyone who says it crashes too much has probably some something extremely silly.
Anyhow, the good point was made above - apple products are expensive, but they run well and their design is top notch. You get what you pay for, in effect. The fact that it's way too much, and their scope is so limited, and their user access is draconian, is up to the consumer to come to terms with.
I use Windows and android at home, because I'm a techie and like to actually pull things apart and know how they work, rather than just have it tell me how to do stuff all the time. Mac has never appealed, except for video editing, which I do rarely these days.
People who get frustrated with Windows are usually the type who will install random shit like search toolbars and fkn awful antivirus systems because they have no idea what they're doing. Such people are perfectly happy in the Apple play pen, and in the belief that macs don't get viruses...
I think Windows 7 is pretty bloody good actually, and anyone who says it crashes too much has probably some something extremely silly.
Inside Shoulder
Nathan Sharpe (72)
I'm in the apple world but thinking of changing planets - is windows 7 still available OEM (as I think its called)?
Blue
Andrew Slack (58)
After resisting for years I have moved to Mac becuase some of my associates work on Mac.
I have one regret.
Not doing it earlier.
Windows just gets it's knickers in a knot too much, especially if you are going to run loads of stuff at the same time.
I left my Windows 7 machine in for about three months, thinking there will be loads of stuff I might still need it for. I didn't. It's in the cupboard.
I have the top of the range Retina macbook with a 27" screen (moved from two 24" screens on the PC).
I run MS Office for MAC. Seems stable enough. Virus protection, networking, troubleshooting. All so much more logical.Oh and tiem machine backup is brilliant. You literally plug it in and switch it on.
And not these endless updates that end up breaking Windows.
I run development tools, graphic design tools.
If you ever plan to convert your Outlook mail to windows mail talk to me I will save you the hours I wasted.
Streaming stuff from the MAC to the Ipad is also so bloody easy.
I have one regret.
Not doing it earlier.
Windows just gets it's knickers in a knot too much, especially if you are going to run loads of stuff at the same time.
I left my Windows 7 machine in for about three months, thinking there will be loads of stuff I might still need it for. I didn't. It's in the cupboard.
I have the top of the range Retina macbook with a 27" screen (moved from two 24" screens on the PC).
I run MS Office for MAC. Seems stable enough. Virus protection, networking, troubleshooting. All so much more logical.Oh and tiem machine backup is brilliant. You literally plug it in and switch it on.
And not these endless updates that end up breaking Windows.
I run development tools, graphic design tools.
If you ever plan to convert your Outlook mail to windows mail talk to me I will save you the hours I wasted.
Streaming stuff from the MAC to the Ipad is also so bloody easy.
Blue
Andrew Slack (58)
The_Brown_Hornet
John Eales (66)
So as promised last year, I'm reporting back on how we're doing with moving away from Exchange. The short answer is very well. Feature for feature Zimbra does everything Exchange does and more and at a lower cost (for us anyway). The Outlook integration is excellent and allows people to stay using it if they don't want to use the web client. The web client is very feature rich and I use it full time now, as do about half of our users. The storage mechanism Zimbra uses is vastly superior to Exchange and thus will allow us to scale up more easily, as well as backup/recovery (which we can do with our NetAPP snapshots and SnapMirror). The fact that it runs on Unix/Linux platforms is a plus for us, given that the majority of our other infrastructure is also built that way. There are lots of little niceties too, like online chat, web conferencing and plugins for external applications like Salesforce.
It's a reasonable amount of work to do it, but we've proven that it can be done if you're motivated (we were).
Solid point, Acer are very close to the budget end of Windows laptops.
If you want to spend macbook pro dollars then get an Alienware laptop and let us know how that goes
1. Please read my post #3 above.
2. Following those earlier painful experiences with the Apple empire I can now add a couple more. My son had an iPhone 4, which he was in the habit of dropping. Occasionally. Regularly. Good ole Dad found a local techie who was happy to replace the screens for a reasonable fee and a 30 minute wait. BUT, during one of my Canberra wine-selling expeditions Lindommer Junior did it again. What he did was go into the Apple store in George Street and purchase a reconditioned iPhone 4 handpiece for a tick under $200. The microphone and antenna were both faulty. After the usual, painful exercise of "booking in a service experience" Apple took his handpiece back, "fixed" it, and returned it. Still faulty. A second service experience was booked. Apple gave him a new handpiece.
3. My Samsung Galaxy S4 mini had a chip problem. Samsung very kindly agreed to fix it although it was about two months out of warranty. A mate gave me his wife's old iPhone 4 to tide me over; unfortunately, it was still attached to her Apple account. It took 1.75 hours at the George Street Apple store to untie it from her Apple account and port my contacts over from the Samsung. And then the Apple techie discovered the handpiece was locked to Telstra! The numbers were wiped during the unlocking procedure, but I found them again in an old Hotmail account. Just absolutely incompetent service.
4. My S4 mini was irreparable. Samsung gave me a new J3, no questions. The young Samsung chappie set up my new phone and restored my contacts from a memory card IN SEVEN MINUTES!
5. I had to get a new PC for my home office earlier this year, which I purchased from my local techie shop (they give outstanding service when things go awry, I wouldn't go anywhere else). As is the way with all modern Microsoft stuff it came with Windows 10 and MS Edge. I find it bloody difficult to navigate 10, things aren't where I'm used to them being (control panel fer starters) and it's not intuitive. AND it comes with a shitload of bloatware which I'll never use. We have Windows 7 on a couple of old laptops with Internet Explorer plus Google Chrome, compared to them Edge is the worst browser by far, unstable, freezes extra tabs and bloody slow.
After some investigation on the interwebby thingy I decided to trial Linux on one of the old laptops. Those who know IT stuff better than me (one of my best mate's brother-in-law's a high level techie, he swears by Linux. And Pfitzy said have a go!) recommended ubuntu MATE for older laptops, so I did. Brilliant! The whole program, including LibreOffice, takes up only 4.7Gb; Mozilla Firefox is the most uncomplicated and stable of all the browsers in this house; and THERE'S NO BLOATWARE! It's super-fast, although I did pay $50 to get an SSD installed on the ACER TravelMate netbook which runs ubuntu MATE. As Linux applications are, mostly, open there are geeks working on them 24/7; this results in any attack being repulsed and patched almost instantly so there's little need for anti-virus software. The only downside of this exercise is the ACER netbook did run Windows 7, why Microsoft ditched 7 I don't know. If I was the techie poohbah for a large organisation I'd seriously consider a Linux environment.
Interesting reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
https://ubuntu-mate.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
A few thoughts on the software wars from a fussy consumer.
2. Following those earlier painful experiences with the Apple empire I can now add a couple more. My son had an iPhone 4, which he was in the habit of dropping. Occasionally. Regularly. Good ole Dad found a local techie who was happy to replace the screens for a reasonable fee and a 30 minute wait. BUT, during one of my Canberra wine-selling expeditions Lindommer Junior did it again. What he did was go into the Apple store in George Street and purchase a reconditioned iPhone 4 handpiece for a tick under $200. The microphone and antenna were both faulty. After the usual, painful exercise of "booking in a service experience" Apple took his handpiece back, "fixed" it, and returned it. Still faulty. A second service experience was booked. Apple gave him a new handpiece.
3. My Samsung Galaxy S4 mini had a chip problem. Samsung very kindly agreed to fix it although it was about two months out of warranty. A mate gave me his wife's old iPhone 4 to tide me over; unfortunately, it was still attached to her Apple account. It took 1.75 hours at the George Street Apple store to untie it from her Apple account and port my contacts over from the Samsung. And then the Apple techie discovered the handpiece was locked to Telstra! The numbers were wiped during the unlocking procedure, but I found them again in an old Hotmail account. Just absolutely incompetent service.
4. My S4 mini was irreparable. Samsung gave me a new J3, no questions. The young Samsung chappie set up my new phone and restored my contacts from a memory card IN SEVEN MINUTES!
5. I had to get a new PC for my home office earlier this year, which I purchased from my local techie shop (they give outstanding service when things go awry, I wouldn't go anywhere else). As is the way with all modern Microsoft stuff it came with Windows 10 and MS Edge. I find it bloody difficult to navigate 10, things aren't where I'm used to them being (control panel fer starters) and it's not intuitive. AND it comes with a shitload of bloatware which I'll never use. We have Windows 7 on a couple of old laptops with Internet Explorer plus Google Chrome, compared to them Edge is the worst browser by far, unstable, freezes extra tabs and bloody slow.
After some investigation on the interwebby thingy I decided to trial Linux on one of the old laptops. Those who know IT stuff better than me (one of my best mate's brother-in-law's a high level techie, he swears by Linux. And Pfitzy said have a go!) recommended ubuntu MATE for older laptops, so I did. Brilliant! The whole program, including LibreOffice, takes up only 4.7Gb; Mozilla Firefox is the most uncomplicated and stable of all the browsers in this house; and THERE'S NO BLOATWARE! It's super-fast, although I did pay $50 to get an SSD installed on the ACER TravelMate netbook which runs ubuntu MATE. As Linux applications are, mostly, open there are geeks working on them 24/7; this results in any attack being repulsed and patched almost instantly so there's little need for anti-virus software. The only downside of this exercise is the ACER netbook did run Windows 7, why Microsoft ditched 7 I don't know. If I was the techie poohbah for a large organisation I'd seriously consider a Linux environment.
Interesting reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
https://ubuntu-mate.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
A few thoughts on the software wars from a fussy consumer.
My home PC is a water cooled gaming beast, never had a problem
Now the work machines, two users continually have issues; they have no idea, make a mistake and blame the machine.
The others have no issues, same build, doing the same stuff.
But I encouraged my mother to go apple/iPhone/iPad/macbook:
1/ It is idiotproof'ish
2/ I can't support it/her
My relationship with her has improved markedly since this approach has been adopted
Now the work machines, two users continually have issues; they have no idea, make a mistake and blame the machine.
The others have no issues, same build, doing the same stuff.
But I encouraged my mother to go apple/iPhone/iPad/macbook:
1/ It is idiotproof'ish
2/ I can't support it/her
My relationship with her has improved markedly since this approach has been adopted
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