The original simplicity of iTunes, and the illusion of “permanence” with iPod are what lured me into Appletraz.
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Printer drivers. End of comment. (Cries)
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Oh here’s one that I was reminded of by @Bishop 's Amazon gripe; the fact that iOS apps can demand precise location access and are allowed to simply not work if users don’t provide it. Examples: the ESPN app and Oceanic+.
For ESPN the region based licensing is apparently so critical that zip-code level position accuracy is not enough. Super annoying. Oceanic plus demands precise location during the initial setup. Don’t give access? No app use for you!
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Plex Premium with Plexamp is a no-brainer. I literally just point it to a music folder (or folders) and it did everything else for me. Lyrics, album art, the whole bit. It is the easiest set-and-forget solution that I have found out there. I am not joking when I call it self-hosted Spotify. You can even have it play related tracks, themes, read bios, etc. Visually, it is as clean as a whistle to navigate and just passively admire. It whips the pants off of Apple Music.
Plug ‘n Play is only 25 years old. Give ‘em time!
April 20, 1998:
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MS driver update somehow break many of my Ryzen laptop drivers. Have to reinstall the official Radeon GPU driver every few months and MS keep breaking it. Now I think my wifi driver is also broken. It had been already 2 years and it’s not like it’s an unbranded Chinese laptop, why does MS keep installing more and more bad drivers on my laptop?
Automatic driver update by Windows should be disabled my default. If someone is not tech savvy enough they might have to call support everytime there is a windows update or their 800$ laptop would be useless with half the software turn up with GPU errors.
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Yeah that sucks, I had that once with an old Asus laptop but with crappy touchpad drivers instead (thankfully precision touchpad drivers are a thing now). Windows Update also kept replacing the drivers that worked and I needed to regularly run the specific drivers downloaded manually from Asus’s website to fix it. At the time what helped for me was using O&O Shutup10 to disable Windows from downloading drivers.
What brand is the laptop? I know some brands are more lackluster with driver updates than others, but yeah MS should give us at least more control over driver updates in the Settings page.
Very annoying. Even more annoying is when a forced Windows update puts your system in an unrecoverable boot loop. Took me quite a while to dig out of:
So yeah, forced updates can be a huge pain!
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Meta is going to verified subscriptions for “only” $15/month on iPhone and iOS. It’s like being forced to pay for police protection against assault, battery, rape, robbery, and vandalism. Thank you Mark. Pay up or you might get mugged!
“Nice Facebook profile you got there, would be a shame if someone were to hack it.”
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As he said in Braveheart “I’m pretty sure you are f****’d”
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Mine is a Lenovo Gaming 3 I bought brand new just over 1 year ago. The Windows driver caused conflict between Radeon iGPU and Nvidia dGPU, making graphic software unable to start on external display, which is what I use to draw on. Download a driver from AMD fixed it and Windows upgrade keep ruining it.
I now understand how many people are content in the walled garden. This is a relatively powerful laptop but I spent more time troubleshooting than the Tab S7 FE which just work and let me draw when I want to draw. If only Windows wasn’t such a necessary evil…
Ok so their budget gaming laptop line (/Ideapad 3 gaming). Personally I do not trust the reliability of budget laptops anymore (except for ironically MS Surface), they tend to cut costs on important components (like for example SSD quality) and would not surprise me if they (Lenovo in this case) sees you as a second-class citizen compared to owners of Legion gaming laptops.
My ssd have been going fine and fast, and despite being “budget” (in a gaming sense, it’s still much more expensive than regular laptop) the laptop is still more powerful than everything i bought before. The only problem was the driver that Windows keep replacing, and using the manufacturer provided driver fix that problem. Just found a way to disable windows driver update so hopefully that stop. Hardware-wise, I have no complain.
Also the main reason I bought it was because everything important were replaceable ( 2 ssd slots and 2 RAM slot) so i could easily pop them open and replace if anything fail. Surface doesn’t give you that option.
Latest gripe based on work I have been doing for a customer for the last couple of days.
Software that leaves all kinds of cr@p behind after an uninstall, including but not limited to orphaned files (especially DLLs) hundreds of registry entries, etc.
I have no experience using the software itself so I can’t speak to the quality of the software, but the Cyberlink suite which seems to be bundled with many consumer HP and Lenovo systems leaves unbelievable amounts of junk behind that screw up a lot of other apps that have similar functions.
Not to mention that on a couple of five year old ideaPads running Windows 10 it literally took 65 minutes per machine for the software to (incompletely) uninstall.
It was so bad, we figured out that it was actually more time efficient to just clean reinstall Windows.
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Corel Videostudio.
Sure, there’s alternatives such as D Resolve, but CVS does what I need it to do. Mostly. You just have to ensure that you click save. A lot. I’ve thrown extensive hardware at the application and it afford little difference when it comes to performance. No matter what, you still have to enable the proxy and until, finished, no matter the hardware, it still sucks.
Year after year, small improvements. If you’re lucky, they might also release a service pack (which usually breaks something else).
Here’s one. I pay for Office 365. Why can I still not whitelist senders in the Windows Mail app? For every single zillow email I need to scroll allll the way down to enable images (because why put “download message and pictures” at the top, that would make too much sense).
Sure, I could allow all images, but that’s not secure (great way to show spam senders that your email was opened). I want them off by default, and on for trusted senders. That should not be hard. Grumble.
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Wow, guys!
That’s a long list of problems I also recall, but said, “Uh, no. Never Again,” to after I reached my limits.
Automatic Windows updates you can’t refuse? That’s not been a problem for me since I lobotomized my Windows 10 machine back in 2017.
Though, last year I had a Windows box running a YouTube studio, (using a copy of that same lobotomized version), and one of the partners I was working with somehow initiated an auto update. (I think it was due to his clicking an option in the Shut Down menu. I since did the HKEY voodoo which removed that.)
Anyway, it completely fsked half the weird little video capture and finicky audio drivers we had set up, and for some reason the CPU was stuck in some kind of perpetual 35% load so all the recording that day was choppy. It was a total disaster. A waste of a show guest.
Luckily, I had the Windows recovery feature set up, where it will let you return to a previous state if you managed to do it within a two week window. I caught it with a couple days to spare.
After that, I bought another hard drive and cloned the system in case something like that happened again. I cannot for the life of me understand why people put up with that kind of nonsense, hours of system lockup while arbitrary updates choose to download. Critical systems, man!
Whatever.
My only real gripes today, (aside from the existence of social media as a CIA global mind-fsk operation, smartphone culture in general, and iOS and Android in specific)…
Why the #&*% does SM Player take 90 seconds to begin playing a video after initial startup? (I suspect it might be loading every single font I have on my hard drive in case I need subtitles in fringging arabic bold ‘dingbat’.)
Same for the built-in Windows photo viewing apps. Just start, you POS! I don’t need to wait a whole minute while you sort your isht out! What can you POSSIBLY need to think about for fifty million cycles? Just decode the JPG and post it to the screen, you #$&*…! That’s your ONLY job.
Other than that…, any Adobe ‘Cloud’ product past 2015 is absolute junk, and ClipStudio Paint’s recent update where all the brushes I used on a daily basis were removed from the base package and turned into ‘fun!’ downloadable items you have to hunt around for on their micro-transaction server and laboriously re-install. (The day is coming when they’re going to turn that into a revenue stream. I don’t update CSP anymore.)
Otherwise, it’s all good.
Heaven help me when the day comes that my current stable of Trusty Gear is put out to pasture and I have to buy some machine which only runs on Windows 15 or whatever Brave New OS will have the remains of our humanity in a nut vice.
Half of me wishes the Commodore Amiga was still a going concern.
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Right, the Windows default image viewer. Or music player. I don’t need some dumb app that take almost a minute to start up, putting me in fullscreen mode, connecting to some dumb online streaming that I won’t use. Anything that putting you out of tabbed browsing is no good for multitasking. I only need to quick view a picture or turn on offline music in the background!
Thankfully I still have the option to use wpm instead of groove, but the lack of the old windows image viewer is unbearable.
And yeah, I also noticed the lack of old trusty brushes when reinstall CSP. Time to backup those brushes into .sut files.
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