{"id":46380,"date":"2019-03-28T06:00:36","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T10:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46380"},"modified":"2019-04-01T03:48:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T07:48:42","slug":"setting-a-pc-up-for-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46380","title":{"rendered":"Setting a PC up for Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s lack of a Spider-Man<\/a> post is brought to you by my now-dead solid state drive. After 6 years of heavy use, it finally gave up the ghost.\u00a0 Considering that it spent most of those 6 years with 220+ of its 250GB in use, I’d say the device performed admirably and died gracefully. In the end, I could still read from it, even though I couldn’t write to it. This prevented Windows from booting up, but it let me rescue my dataActually, I didn’t need much from the drive. I backed up my old \/Users folder, but I haven’t needed to retrieve anything out of there yet.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

I originally blamed this mess on Windows Update, since the machine died just a couple of minutes after installing an update. But I think the patch was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The machine was probably destined to die at some point that day. It was just a question of which program would attempt the final write that exhausted the drive.<\/p>\n

I’ve since replaced the drive with a 500GB SSD and re-installed Windows. The machine is mostly back to normal now, but I’m still missing a few bits and pieces of software and working to get caught up on some of the other bits of writing I have to do.<\/p>\n

I will say this new Windows 10 install feels very snappy. Either SSDs slow down as they reach the end of their useful lifespan, or Windows 10 still suffers from the long-running problem where a particular install will accumulate boot-time cruft that eventually erodes the system performance.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Cloud-Based Future<\/h3>\n

A little over 20 years ago, I started seeing articles predicting the end of local software. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison<\/a>\u00a0was always a big critic of physical media and frequently promised us a future in the cloudAlthough I don’t think it was called “the cloud” until recently.<\/span>. I remember being really annoyed by an article by John Dvorak<\/a> in PC Magazine in the mid 90s where he predicted that all of our software would be served over the web. At the time, that sounded preposterous. Why make all these super-fast computers and then run our software over the slow-ass web? Even with a T1 line<\/a> to your house, there’s no way web-based stuff will be as fast as local.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

But Dvorak’s prediction is slowly coming to pass. Google’s services now provide me with word processing, spreadsheets, and calendars. I even wrote my most recent book<\/a>\u00a0entirely in Google Docs. That’s 134k words written in an online app. Not bad. The app got to be a little sluggish near the end of the book,\u00a0 but it was still better than the bloated LibreOffice and MS WordGD launches quickly and runs smoothly, but staggers once the document gets to be large. The big word processors launch slowly, but once they get going they don’t have trouble with document size. In the vast majority of my use cases, the first is better.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

I do word processing on the cloud. I sometimes stream music rather than playing local MP3s. I watch streaming video and I haven’t touched a DVD movie in months. I’m nowhere near the point where everything is on the cloud, but I’m closer now than I would have thought possible just 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

Having said that, we’re still not living in the cloud. If anything, I depend on more local programs than ever.<\/p>\n

They Say That Setting Up is Hard to Do<\/h3>\n

It’s been almost a week, and I’m still stopping about once a day to install things. For the curious:<\/p>\n