OT: Laptop feature matrix?

[geoff]

In message , Bill writes

Sorry about this, but it seems a perfect place to hijack the thread

I've recently got an Aspire 5332 laptop (not out of choice) with win7 home, which has a camera and speakers in but, for some reason, no microphone (unglaublich !).

I loaded skype and was using a headset with two jacks (mic and speaker), and it all worked OK. I came to try it last night to talk to Yullie (who's in Belgium ATM) and ... no sound. Tried my USB headset, that worked and tried the mic on another (XP) machine

The Aspire doesn't recognise the microphone. Is there anything I'm missing or does it have to be a fault that's developed with the laptop ?

[Dave Liquorice]

The Vista video drivers on the kids machine (both the onboard and different makers card) allow you to rotate the screen orientation. A widescreen monitor with its narrow edge horizontal would be excellent. If I used doze all the time I'd probably find some why of have a screen orientated like that.

[Bill]

In message , geoff writes

Nothing would surprise me, but are you sure it doesn't? The casing looks similar to my Acer and there is a tiny pinhole above the keyboard. It doesn't matter because it's useless when it works.

This is probably a sucking eggs moment, but have you gone into Control Panel-> Manage Audio Devices-> Recording and right clicked to show all disabled devices? If so and Microphone is there and set to be the default and there is no level meter waggling beside it, then you maybe have a fault. A lot of these machines also have the useless "jack sensing" which I think is done by a primitive switch on the socket. Maybe the standard blow down the socket and poke the jack in and out lots of times might help?

I just think there needs to be some sort of outcry about audio on cheap modern laptops based on the ones I've seen and had difficulty hearing.

[geoff]

In message , Bill writes

No you absolutely hit the nail on the head

it was disabled, which was what I thought had happened, I just didn't know exactly how to resurrect it

thanks

[Huge]

The Xerox Alto and Star workstations, which is where all this GUI nonsense came from, had their screens in portrait orientation. The Alto one sheet, the Star two, side by side.

another thing that MS got wrong.

[Dave Liquorice]

And have yet to correct, I'm staggered that Windows still has horrible user unfriendly features that where in Windows 2.11. Some have horrible work arounds that most users wouldn't notice but you only have to open the bonnet a crack and look to see what an awful mess Windows really is.

[Adrian]

Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

GUI "nonsense"? Can I remind you what it was like trying to format a doc in WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS?

White on blue text, with purple for bold and green for italic or whatever it was...?

Modern widescreens get us to Star-type config, though. This 1920x1200 laptop is dead easy to work with two A4 pages, portrait, side by side.

[Huge]

Perhaps I needed an tag.

And no, I don't. I never used Windows until NT. I was sitting in front of a Xerox Star at the time, thinking (wrongly, obviously), that Windows would never catch on. Hell, we pissed ourselves laughing at the first PC we saw - an Olivetti running DOS 3.3, IIRC.

So it only took them 30-odd years to catch up.

[dennis]

Windows doesn't care which way around a screen is. It never has. I have used widescreens upside down and windows just works as it should. You do have to tell it if there is no automatic switching done by the display but that's true of all OSes.

such as?

[Dave Liquorice]

features

The worst is the file extension being used as a program association. You can't, for example, open some .jpg files with one application, other .jpg files with another and yet other .jpg files with a third etc. If you make a change of the association *all* files with the same extension also change to opening with the new program.

If you have a dialogue open you can't switch focus to other windows to resize or move them should you need to. Maybe the dialogue is affecting the content of those windows an you want to see the affect or you need to see information in them that the dialogue has opened over and can't be moved far enough to uncover that information.

Vista (at least) is inconsistent, some times you need to double click an icon sometimes you only need to click once for the action to take place.

There are more, I guess most windoze users are so brain washed that they don't notice the limitations and how much the user interface actually gets in the way.

[Huge]

That irritates me more than anything - it seizes the input focus - and is one of the things I like about Linux - it doesn't.

Bringing the focused window to the front. That's really annoying, too.

Quite so.

[Steve Firth]

It's far worse than that. The Vista/XP Open File dialog box is so borked that it can be used to break Windows laughable attempts at security lock down.

[Huge]

Which one? Aren't there about 8 or 9 different kinds?