Because they care far more about making an extra couple of dollars than they do about keeping you happy. I thought that was obvious by now?

Apple products are just well-designed consumer products They aren't, though. Sure, they're pretty, but this guy can't use his computer because the keyboard was poorly designed. My wife can't use hers because it's a heat hoarding throttle bastard.

They aren't intercepting calls to tech support, they are tech support.

Call belkin some time, the number in the manual that came with the router. You'll get these people who tell you that you can't connect to the internet because you have a virus, not because you have a bad switch. Then the idiots will try to make you let them in so they can fix your computer for $450, even though you're calling about bad hardware that stops you from getting online.

Call up the support number for Avast and you'll get the same thing.

I don't know how many companies have fallen for this "cheap outsourced tech support" crap, but it's obviously a growing problem. It's not just scams, companies are handing these people their own customers so that they won't have to pay salaries for telephone support.

Why not blame vista for being designed around hardware that wouldn't be commonly available for another 2 years?

Was it the media's fault that Vista required 2GB of RAM to be usable when at release most XP systems were still being sold with 256MB of RAM? Or I guess the driver manufacturers were to blame for Microsoft throwing away the actually usable Windows Longhorn and throwing together a piece of garbage from scratch in 1 year instead? They scrapped pretty much 100% of the planned technology improvements and just went "Let's make it really damn pretty instead"

There is nothing wrong with Vista SP2 on modern hardware. That doesn't mean there was nothing wrong with Vista when it came out.

There was something wrong with his windows install. I get these in my shop with fair regularity (they don't have a large enough hard drive to install windows 10 updates, so I have to wipe them and start from scratch with new builds for people because of Microsoft's boneheaded update methods) and they turn on in about 4 seconds. I've always been absolutely amazed at how fast these things run given that they're garbage. They only run "like molasses" if you do something CPU intensive.

My video card is literally 8,000 times more powerful than video cards were when direct X 9 came out. I only paid $150 for it.

New games have a direct X 10 or 11 mode, old games which are Direct X 9 only aren't actually taxing to modern hardware. It really doesn't matter if you lose 10% performance (hint: you don't and you're full of crap) because modern hardware is way more than 10% faster.

You still have to install directX 9 to get access to all the features, just like you did in Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. If you're getting worse performance in DirectX 9 it's because you didn't install the DirectX 9 online package, which has lots of "after spec" work going on for like 4 full years. A lot of games use that crap, and don't work well without it.

Games like SWTOR tell you straight out to install the pack, because new OS don't come with anything but basic functionality on DirectX 9, Windows 7 included.

This is because Windows 10 upgrades drivers pretty frequently to combat all the scam "driver update" programs.

It's completely unnecessary in both cases, and it causes bluescreens because lots of drivers do not unload properly.

Pretty much every WIndows 10 bluescreen I have experienced or seen in a event log (if it wasn't a virus, failing hard-drive, or bad RAM) was a driver update.

But is an occasional update related bluescreen worse than locking up and having to be reset, which older versions of windows did? I may see more blue screens over the hundreds of computers I work on, but I don't see any more actual stability problems. Nobody brings back their computers and say "It's causing problems, put it back."

Not one. Even when I explicitly say "If you have any problems I can put it back for free."

yeah, and if my computer magically reorganized itself every few months that would drive me crazy too. But that isn't what's happening. You upgraded to a radically different software version and things moved.

The same thing would happen with your CAD software if you had bothered to install any version of it since Windows XP. Normal people actually upgrade their software once in awhile instead of expecting to use the same version of their CAD software for 20 years straight.

For me to reset an old local account password and gain access to a PC takes me less than 20 seconds.

I cannot reset a microsoft password, I have to work around it, and working around it generally takes about 5 minutes.

Add in the time it takes windows to add the default administrative account to a users files to allow me to look at them and you're looking closer to 30 minutes to steal someones files from a Microsoft account (assuming I don't just use a Linux boot CD).

You may not like it, but it's more secure.

Biggest problem is that "pin" nonsense. Nobody who brings their PCs into my shop knows what their password actually is, they only know the PIN. That's going to bite them in the ass someday.

wait wait wait

You mean that under Windows 10 it's in the same place it's been since Windows 2000? How terribly confusing that must be for you!

That's not a "missing" feature, it's a "we left it where you already know to find it" feature. That shit is a good thing, changing a setting that's been in the same place for 16 years is a stupid decision. That's why the old control panel is still there.

95% of things like that are in exactly the same place as they are in Windows 7, that's a stupid thing to complain about.

You'd think that, wouldn't you? But have you actually tried it?

Windows 10 just does whatever it feels like with driver upgrades, regardless of what the settings are. I have problems with older intel graphics chips because of that all the time, old chips won't run new drivers without bios upgrades, the manufacturers won't release bios fixes, so no matter how many times you boot safe mode, blacklist the driver update, tell windows not to download drivers from windows update, etc. Windows 10 still just downloads a non-working driver version and clobbers the computer.

Again, and again, and again.

That's not even remotely close to the effects of perchlorates on adult humans. It inhibits thyroid production, and as far as we know that's about it.

We used to prescribe them regularly for hyperthyroidism. It's really not all that dangerous, it's just an inconvenience that would have to be worked around.

There's a big difference between perchlorates and hyperchlorides. That's like saying "Don't put salt on your chicken, it's the same as bleach!' just because it contains chlorine atoms. Which is to say "false and stupid."

Yep. Cause replacing the glass is soooo much cheaper and easier and less of a hassle than having viruses removed. Sending an ipad back for $299 in work because it was knocked off the table and losing it for a week, verses having to pay $100 to get a virus removed and getting your PC back in a couple days. Much better.

Not to mention how convenient it is to get your files off an ipad when the nand dies. I have been able to recover files from 19 of the last 20 dead hard drives in my shop. I have been able to recovery files off of 2 of the last 45 dead phones/ipads/whatever that came through the door, and that was because they were water damaged and not a nand problem. Oh, or the 28 ipads that have come in since IOS 7 because the update just decided to delete EVERYTHING and the only way to get their devices back up and running was a full reset. Yeah, that's a lot better than a virus too, isn't it?

Malware doesn't really do any damage anymore, it's just irritating. There has not been a single non-hardware problem through my door that resulted in file loss for my customers over the last 2 years. Suggesting that people buy crap that will 100% lose all their important files because of a fault so that they won't be inconvenienced by a stupid FBI scam is irresponsible. People don't know how "the cloud" works, they don't back up their shit. Tablets are worse for their data safety.

No you wouldn't. Have you priced any parts for macs recently? Talk about running into trouble with a particular motherboard model not made anymore, what do you do with the imacs with the GPU solder problems? Replace the board with an identical model, with the same flaw? Yeah, great.

Need a new LCD on your macbook? Oh, look, Apple decided to take a standard LG lcd and reverse 8 of the wires so that you have to buy an Apple LCD from Apple for $400 instead of the generic $60 LG model.

$250 for a new license when replacing an $80 motherboard would still be better than paying $500 for an Apple motherboard. Shit, those things frequently cost more than $330 used on ebay.