Cries into the dark

Now don't get me wrong.  I love my new surface, but I have to say it seems somewhat less stable than the Series 7 Samsung it replaced.  This blog is not about the somewhat more friendly blue screen of an ailing windows 8.1 computer but about the changing world for support organisations.

When this happened I posted the above picture to my twitter feed @tre4b.  This was more to show these things happen to us all than for any other purpose.  About 30 minutes later though I received a reply from Microsoft.

I presume that they had picked up on my use of Windows 8.1 in the tweet and that had rung a bell.  Someone though had followed the picture in order to realise they could not actually make out the error message.  I thanked them for their interest but the message was a general win32k.sys error and not something they were likely to be able to do too much about.

I have long known in my working environment that people do tweet about issues and often appreciate a reply even if that is not actually solving the problem.  Sometimes when things are bad and you want a rant then just being heard is enough.  When I have some time I will be looking a software to pick up words from twitter.  I'd like to be responding to my users cries into the ether too...

Waiting on a Surface Pro 2

In November I finally realised I could not live with a 64 GB hard drive on my work computer any more.  Juggling space on a daily basis is getting me by, but not leading to a stress free working environment.  I plumped for the surface pro 2 even though it is a bit smaller than I would like.  This was because of all the devices out there this was the one with the most acceptable performance and the best support.

Yesterday I chased its arrival to be told I would not see it until March.  Either they are very popular or there is some form of issue or direction change on the cards with the new Microsoft CEO joining soon.  I decided then to look around again and though the market has expanded all of the tablet computers have the same issue, they seem to have been designed as toys.

This is a legacy of the iPad having become the default concept of a tablet.  Tablets today are great for playing games and reading books but not the sort of device you'd want to work on for any amount of time.  Yet the press keep predicting the decline of the PC.   How can this happen?  Tablet PC's and Apps in general do not yet have the ability to deliver what "Windows Legacy applications" can.  I mean can you see yourself forecasting your business spend on the kind of spreadsheet application you see on a tablet?  Do you really think you could work that way?

Someday soon someone is going to combine a proper pen with a decent sized tablet and realise that this would make a good platform to really work on.  I thought I'd found such a thing in the Dell XPS18 but alas they had not included a proper pen and writing with a rubber tipped one is so unsatisfying.   Until then I guess I hang on and wait for my surface pro 2, soon though my eyes are not going to be good enough to cope with such small writing.....