Thursday 26 February 2015

HELP! I NEED SOMEBODY'S HELP.......

Anybody have experience of the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, the hybrid laptop/tablet?

It's main uses would be writing, strolling Cyber Avenue and digging the cool sounds and sights of the You-thing, although not Sir Cliff Richard. Or the Shadows, for that matter, his accomplices. One way or another.

 A Jova, that Hank Marvin; wish he'd come round here, doing his Jova calling. I'd show him the true meaning of Knocking On Heaven's Door. Lives with mr mike, Down Under, does Hank, not with-him with him but on the same  continent. That's how fond he is of Cliff and the Shads, Hank.

Anyway, tech advice gratefully received.. This Apple stuff is killing me slowly.

34 comments:

SG said...

Yes - I've got one of those Surface things. A proper technical evaluation is beyond me but in trying to span the laptop - tablet continuum it does neither job well. IMHO the I-Pad is a far superior tablet.

call me ishmael said...

Thank you, mr sg, that's what I wanted, rather than a tech evaluation.

blackholesunset said...

I can only offer the limited impression I got when considering a Surface Pro 3 myself.

It looks good but I'll be Windows 8.x unless you're prepared to install the Technical Preview of Windows 10, which might be more hastle than it's worth. There are reviews knocking around of the Windows 10 preview on Surface Pro, which might help to decide whether that was a worthwhile option.

At the time, I wanted a portable device for software development but I wasn't sure that the keyboard would be up to a lot of comfortable typing and having to carry around a real keyboard would, at least partially, defeat the purpose of going for a Pro 3.

I ended up looking at laptops rather than a Surface Pro. Asus and others offer a whole range of i5 laptops with decent kepboards and there are a small number with touch screens as well.

I'm a bit of a Windows 8 Luddite in that I won't touch the thing. All new laptops seem to ship with 8 but at least you usually have the option to install 7 manually, give or take driver support for newer hardware.

If you're happy with Window 8.x (or the Windows 10 preview) and you can find somewhere with a Pro 3 on demo, to try out the keyboard, it might be ideal.

Alternatively, you can get a lot of laptop for the same money and you'd be able to type with it propped up on your legs, or on the edge of the table while on a train, but laptops are relatively bulky when the keyboard's not in use.

Hope that helps.

A mirage made in heaven said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
A mirage made in heaven said...

Can't help Mr I. Some snake offered me a bite of a fruit and now I, too, have a little knowledge.

I know you're a bit of a Bobbist, so what do you think of this link? The guy is possibly a little too conspiratorial for our own good (and this from a man whom effortlessly passes the JFK/911 Mannlicher-Carcarno/boxcutters test). Funny though, when I mentioned this to the loveliness that is my wife, she didn't get too sniffy about its possibility and reminded me about some of Cohen's comments on his Bobbliness:

http://mileswmathis.com/dylpdfan.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr bhs, probably a laptop, then. The train isn't a factor in my stoney life, nor is portability, generally. And I would be happy were everything still in Windows XP, happier, anyway.

You feeling better?

call me ishmael said...

At your recommendation, I have just read a lot of mr mathis, mr mirage. He, like most of us, needs an editor. Or he needs to come here, where we know that there is no business like showbusiness. I suspect that Bob Dylan's music will not long survive those of us who heard it newly produced; Clinton and Obama be damned, what do they know of value or quality? What does Jack Nicholson know? Those who sing Dylan's praises sing their own; Bobsession is narcissism; save for the pampered experiences of a gilded few, the 'sixties were shit.

I think that one of the best Bobisms was from mr mongoose's Lady Joni Mitchell, in a recent CBS interview -on youtube - He invented this strange character, just in order to deliver his songs; some of which were very good....

Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald, some people just believe what they're told.

mongoose said...

Yeah, if you want to type stuff, you need a keyboard and if you need a keyboard, you may as well have a laptop. There are ultra-lite laptops available for £250 or so - even with a touch screen, if you want one - and they will knowck your socks off. They are cheap at the moment because it seems that their section of the market is being replaced by tablets-with-crap-keyboards. Crudely put though, tablets are for selecting output not creating input.

call me ishmael said...

Tell me which one to get and I will get it, mr mongoose, I like that input/output thing. Thanks.

If you have twenty minutes,that link, from mr mirage is very interesting, especially the reported comments of Joni Mitchell, which I missed on the first speed-reading.

I think it is a conspiracy theory too far for me, not because of my credibility threshold but just because of my own reading and personal experience of the historical facts, the performances especially. I would value your own view of, just for instance, theassertion that Leonard Cohen wrote Shelter From The Storm. Seems preposterous to me, I think Dylan more than linguistically capable, but within mr mathis's wider theory it is internally consistent.

call me ishmael said...

I have read it all now, mr mirage and had not meant to appear dismissive. It is an interesting proposition, that the careers of pop musicians were owned and orchestrated by global intelligence agencies but beyond the politics, mr mathis seems to lack any understanding of the capability of artistry to reinvent and digress and surprise.

Sure, Albert Grossman was vile, I saw him, a foot away, outside a Dylan concert, checking and evaluating the audience and he would give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Sure, Imagine is a shitty lyric from a shitty materialist; sure, people like David Crosby are repulsive predators; sure, Jewish parents ring them bells to promote their children's careers and finally surely the person who calls himself Bob Dylan is a ruthless plagiarist and as reported here, a little while back, reluctant to give others due credit and probably a very nasty person, in person. None of that makes mr mathis's case for global conspiracy, even though I wish it did. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, and that of Her Loveliness.

Eighteen pages is hard going, though, even fir a fool such as I, who sometimes blogs like a bastard.

mongoose said...

I'll look at the link this evening, Mr I, after I have whipped the children weeping to their attic beds.

Well, I do not recommend hardware to anyone but a colleague got one of these - or v similar at Christmas - and it seems more than adequate for normal people. The screen is quite small but that's part and parcel of being ultra lite and nimbly portable. It is Windows 8 but one can get used to anything. Try it before you buy it if unsure but Acer do quite robust kit. It should do you. Weighs in at a bag of sugar-and-a-bit, I think. Take care that the scoundrels at that link do not hammer you for another fifty quid to courier it to you up there. But I guess that you are used to all that.

mongoose said...

The loon has a web-kitty! That's a good indicator in itself.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, it looks good. And cheap. I will order one up.

mongoose said...

I was about to advise you to visit the local branch of PC World and try it out but I guess that the nearest is probably in Norway. It will be fine but expect 250-quid's-worth.

A mirage made in heaven said...

His stuff does gel with Dave McGowan's highly entertaining 'Laurel Canyon' series, but I agree with your comment on artistic potential. I think he sort of nails Marx though in another article.

You're so right about everyone needing an editor; only the other day the wife and I were forced in all our cultural paucity (not owning a television or subscribing to any newspapers) into discussing the possibility that Golding would never had a career but for one editor at Faber.

One of the things that she said that Cohen had said was how he took two years to craft a song while Bob seemingly knocked off masterpieces in five minutes.

I think it was George Tremlett (sic?) who wrote a rather good book about the money side of pop music and I agree with you that it's always more about greed than any Frankfurt School machination.

call me ishmael said...

Shelter From The Storm IS a storming lyric and on the album an impressive performance but so is nearly everything on Blood On The Tracks - Simple Twist Of Fate, If You See Her, Big Girl Now, Idiot Wind, Buckets Of Rain, he doesn't ascribe these to Cohen. As for the use of 'twas (in another lifetime) I am sure it occurs widely in the folk cannon, Dylan uses it in early covers and I believe in his later version of Nic Jones' Canadee-i-o, 'twas all of a fair and handsome girl.......on Good As I Bin To You, seems very far fetched to build a case for Cohen's authorship on the basis of a few words, and a presumed judaic poesy. John Wesley Harding was riven with such language and allegory, no Cohenism, there. Mr Tambourine Man and several of its album companions, in any event, for me, eclipse lyrically, anything else in popular music...to dance beneath the diamond skies, with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until to-morrow.....Hey, Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me, in the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you. It's a lomg way from Bobby Vee's Rubber Ball.

I din't doubt that there may well be a collective impresario, a furtive A and R man guiding music fashions, developing product, just as in the car business, the white goods business, the rag trade but mr mathis's premise, although cogently argued, falls down, as I said, in his failure to understand or acknowledge the vagaries of whatever it is, the creative wellspring, the muse, the collective unconsciousness which enslaves us all, freeing us in rare moments.

For Bobsessives, however, mathis is a far more entertaining deconstructor than was AJ Weberman. And probably a better read than was Robert Shelton's ghastly, fawning No Direction Home.

It was the great Lester Bangs who observed that Once you got a recording contract you ain't doin' Rock'n'Roll, yer in business. Who could argue with that?

call me ishmael said...

canon, in the folk canon

blackholesunset said...

If you've already ordered the Acer, Mr Ishmael, all well and good because it looks like great value.

If you haven't decided yet, it might be an idea to go for a bit more memory and a faster cpu to keep up with OS bloat.

There are a few alternatives, with touch screen, on Acer's own site: http://www.acer.co.uk/ac/en/GB/content/group/laptops

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr bhs, the purchase is awaiting a visit to fair Inverness, where I can try things out; I will bear it all in mind.

Mike said...

I would avoid Windows 8; try and get Win 7 installed. And a bit more memory as Mr bhs advises.

I have an iMac as well, but am never sure if its watching me. Can't advise any Apple stuff.

call me ishmael said...

Christ, can they see all the way to Australia, those fuckers? I just wish I hadn't spilt a pint of water into my old Dell, on which I had written this whole blog. Thanks for the advice.

I tried your beany, pulsey, nutty diet, by the way, minus the dago sausage, on top of my dark green leafy vegetables and fruit and it suits me very well, thank you. Diabetics have a yearly background blood analysis and mine, last week, was the best it's been in thirty years.

Mike said...

I have a 5-year old Dell laptop running Win7. Since I replaced the hard disk with a solid state disk its like its on Viagra.

I keep hoping it will break, so I can justify to my wife getting a new one.

Mike said...

Its the little iCamera that watches you wanking, even when the machine is turned off. Best to put a bit of gaffer tape over the little eye.

call me ishmael said...

Oh, I always do that. The tape thing. On the laptops. Andthe camera's on the back of the i-thing. Isn't it?

call me ishmael said...

Is it easy to change a hard thing?

Mike said...

Its an easy thing to do to switch to SSD, just a couple of screws on the dell. I did a clean re-install of windows as well. It takes an hour of your life, but its probably the best performance thing you can do on a laptop or pc. If you don't feel 100% confident a tech kid could easily do it for a few quid.

One tip, after reinstalling turn off disk defrag - no need on a solid state drive.

On the iMac the camera is on the front. I may be paranoid, but I don't like it.

Mike said...

PS plenty of ytube vids showing how to do the SSD install.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, of course, youtube. I. should take a course, if there is one locally.

Mike said...

Apologies, Mr I, I didn't meant to be patronising, only helpful, but I don't know how brave you are when it comes to taking the back off a PC.

call me ishmael said...

No, no need to apologise. It hadn't occurred to me. I tend to think of youtube just for music performances. I have never been inside a computer but until recently I had never operated a JCB or a cherry picker, both of which would be my lottery winner's vehicle of choice.

The Dell actually works, I can access all the programmes, Picasa, Docs, Word, Office, Windows Media and so on, apart from the internet connection bit.

Mike said...

No worries, Mr I. I'm old school, still build my own PCs because they need to do a specific job - calculations in my case.

When I was doing my PhD I often slept next to the computer - a PDP9 - as it occaisionally needed memory boards switching.

That was until my Prof and mentor told me he got the PDP cheap from Windscale because it had a high level of background radiation.

blackholesunset said...

If it's only the internet connection that's broken on your Dell, Mr Ishmael, you could try a usb-to-ethernet or usb-to-wifi adapter dongle.

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=usb+ethernet+adapter

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/search-keywords/xx_xx_xx_xx_xx/usb%2Bwifi/xx-criteria.html

One of these should at least get your Dell back on line, even if you go for a new laptop as well.

I'm with Mr Mike on the merits of switching to SSD and doing a clean install of Windows 7.

New, branded PC gear always seems to come with pre-installed crud and Windows 8 is a pain for XP or Win 7 users.

I'd definitely recommend Windows 7 to XP users who are getting a new PC.

It's been around long enough to be just as stable as XP was and pretty much everything is the same or better than XP.

call me ishmael said...

I tried thevusb to ethernet and it didn't help, mr bhs. I'll try it all again, see what happens.

blackholesunset said...

Sorry to hear that, Mr Ishmael, I should have guessed you might've already tried one or the other.

I did notice a few forum posts reporting that hardware driver support seems to be quite variable between different models of usb ethernet adapter dongle under XP.

Some might work without installing a driver but most appear not to. One user reported that his dongle was recognised by XP without a driver but didn't actually work until he ran the accompanying CD.

Does the dongle you have appear to be recognised by XP and correctly configured?