DBPower, who sell electronic equipment via Amazon, etc. First the item I bought went wrong immediately on being switched on, then contacting them through their website never worked. I emailed and heard nothing for over a week, then they asked for an Order Number. Having emailed this info, I then get a bounce-back email saying that recipient's email is full so I have to re-send later. Yet their amazon feedback contains numerous references to excellent and prompt customer service...

I trust you will be setting the record straight on that front then.

I only do that when I'm waiting on someone tbf lol.

That MS Surface 'I couldn't do that on a Mac' ad is so fcuking pathetic for so many reasons.

But it is accurate.
Now, if they said "I couldn't do that on an iPad" then I'd have issues with it.

Mark

What gets me is how many potential buyers are actually thinking to themselves, 'I could Photoshop with that thing like it's the 90's!' for it to be a prime time ad lol. I totally get that a lot of people use Macs for creative work, but Joe Average would need to be taking serious note for the sort of money MS must be spending on the ads. TV, cinema, print, radio... all showing you Surface usage most people do on their phone/tablet now if ever at all.

The Surface Pro is a premium product, aimed primarily at the business market.

For that it is excellent and what you can do on that, you can't do on a smartphone or tablet, likewise, it does things that you can't do on a normal notebook either. With desktop dock, monitor, keyboard and mouse it makes a good desktop replacement, but with the cover keyboard it makes a decent mobile workstation and in tablet mode, you can use it to take notes with the pen, or make presentations.

I had one for nearly 2 years and it was excellent - although I found that I used about 95% in laptop or desktop mode, so when I left the company and had to get a new laptop, I went with a notebook with 360° hinge that lets me turn it into a tablet if I need it. That gives me a better keyboard and is more stable on my lap.

Heh. Which, for all those who don't know, is a euphemism for "is aimed at business executives who aren't going to pay for it with their own money, don't really know how it works and actually just want to be able to present powerpoints to other business executives in as ostentatious and superficially impressive a way as possible."

Argghhh.... Bloody clients.

OK - the situation is this. Somewhen in 2013, I get a call from someone who had been referred to me by a client. They are winding down entity A and setting up entity B. They lost their web master (who was based in Australia) partly because their web host didn’t like him being on the other side of the planet (I know, I know). So I get this Wordpress site to look after. Our first line of business was to move the site from expensive host to somewhere cheaper (actually my server, as I know how that and their support bods tick). However, they can”t get the password for the domain name because (and here is the underlying problem) the owner of the domain seems to be about 80 and has forgotten where it is, and his son kind of doesn’t really have the time/interest to locate it.

So we keep the site where it is. I get invited to meeting with them in London early 2014 - which was interesting - all ex-Abbey Road engineers who are trying to preserve recordings - but all over retirement age. One actually went back to Abbey Road to rebuild equipment for Oasis, but I expect they were all there when the likes of Pink Floyd and the Beatles were in full swing.

Anyhow contact after that dwindled, to the point where I got a phone call form one in summer of 2014 telling me that I’ll hear from them when they are ready to carry on. In June 2015, my other client (the one who referred them to me) asks me if I have had anything from then recently and I said that I hadn’t and he said that they move “glacially”. So I fire off an email to both the people who I should be dealing with asking about what the current situation was and whether my services were still needed. I got no reply, so I assumed then that the project was dead (or, maybe some of them had died taking it with them). The website, I expected, would peter out as bills stop being paid. Some kind of reply would have kept me interested.

Yesterday, I got an urgent email. Their service provider was concerned that it had not been updated to the latest version of Wordpress, and some of the plugins may be compromised. Can it be sorted out urgently or they’ll suspend it. Suddenly, they are answering emails! Still winding down entity A, but the website needs retaining. I did say that they had sent an email last year about what the situation was, for which I got an apology.

So I did what was needed, installed Wordfence which warns when updates are needed or if the site is compromised.

This just pissed me off - the day was pretty much mapped out, and I guess I should have just replied saying "tough - you haven’t contacted me for 2 years, didn’t reply to my email June last year so I assumed the deal was off - I can schedule this work in towards the end of next week". But I’m not a total git, and I thought that if I did the job it would at least ensure that they did know I was still active, and an invoice will be involved.

The moral of the story - keep your freelancers in the loop, and reply to emails. I’ll be adding this advice to the email that contains the invoice.

Also - WordPress. I’ve got a couple of sites running it just to see what it’s about, with Wordfence keeping an eye on them and alerting me to any problems. I get at least one such email a week - various updates needing to be applied. I keep them all up to date, but I’m kind of glad I don’t have a large collection of them to administer.

I use a Surface Pro 4, (the cheapest one) as my main work computer. It's connected, via the dick, to two external 24" monitors, so I have three screens in total, and it really is the ideal solution. I also use an external keyboard and mouse, as the Surface keyboard is a bit pants for continuous use.

Sounds painful

I too found the Surface ad with the stage designer bloke extremely irritating.

"I could never do this on a Mac" is a flat out lie for one thing. "I couldn't do this without additional hardware" is a fair statement (hello Wacom Cintiq).
A point incidentally the ASA couldn't quite get their heads around, or rather were unwilling to accept once they'd decided that I was talking about a graphics tablet rather than a stylus operated display - idiots.

My observation would be that, in that set up, what the core 'computer' is in it is pretty irrelevant.

Painful...? You have no idea!

I do also take it home and use it as a mini-laptop, when I need to, and occasionally as a tablet, but yeah, I wouldn't use it in that way as a day to day workhouse, and the ad's are bloody annoying!

Out of all the BS updates Spotify gets, you think they'd issue one where the track controls and details don't get stuck.

I was driving home yesterday and when I stopped at a red light at a junction, saw a cyclist behind me weave his way past the cars and go across. What annoyed me was that this dickhead had one of those Go Pro cameras on his head to document the terrible motoring injustices done to cyclists, yet felt that it was perfectly OK for him to break the law. Hypocrite.