SamCogan.com

Archive for May, 2009

Looking for work over the summer

Friday, May 22nd, 2009


As I have now completed my time at University, I am going to be looking for work over July and August. So if anyone has any contract work over the summer, either in Systems Administration or Software Development, please do let me know. The work would need to be in the UK, or be done remotely, preferably in the South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire or London areas.

There is a copy of my CV attached to this post if you would like to know more. I can be contacted at mail [@] samcogan dot com.

Sam's CV

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The Death March of Windows XP

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009


This week I encountered something that I feel was a sign of the beggining of the end of XP as a mainstream OS.

I like XP, its solid, quick and doesn’t try and tell me what to do, unlike some OS’s we know and I’m sure it will be around as a useful OS for a while yet. However I think the problem I encountered signals the beginning of the end for its mainstream use.

My housemates laptop died the other day and he needed it for an important presentation of an application he had written, in 3 days time. So he went out and bought a brand new Acer laptop, which , you guessed it, came with Vista pre-installed.

We installed his app and proceeded to test it. It was slow, dog slow. Unusable for this demonstration. We know it worked in XP on his old laptop, and this one was much more powerful, so lets install XP, that should solve it. We bunged in the XP disk started the setup and away we went. Except we didn’t, it blue screened.

I know this blue screen, I’ve seen it many times before, on servers where I’m installing the OS and it needs drivers supplying for the Hard Disk controller, but I’ve never had to do it on a desktop OS (except my RAID card, but that’s expected). So here we are, we don’t have the controller drivers for XP, they weren’t supplied, but more importantly we don’t have a floppy drive to use to install them, as that’s what the driver loader in the setup application needs. So we had to abandon the install.

This is the problem, these new machines are coming with disk controllers that work fine with Vista, but XP doesn’t know what they are. Couple this with the lack of floppy drives in most new machines and you know most standard users are never going to find a way to install XP.

So even if you can convince the hardware supplier to give you a copy of XP, the progress of today’s hardware is going to start preventing the practical installation of XP. It may just be the odd machine now, but give it a year, and most new machines will be incapable of installing XP without drivers and a floppy drive, and users aren’t going to do that. And that’s why I feel XP is beginning its march to the grave.

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