I'm still pretty mixed on this.

Fundamentally I know there can be very few reasons to not depend on the chance that the developers are competent and doing right by you over time.

I've also seen where @scottalanmiller describes a totally unstable experience. At the same time I know several other Mangoes haven't had any of the same issues. My own experience is really limited but had a pretty fair amount of glitchy type stuff, empty dialog boxes and empty error messages to work through. 7 years of advances shouldn't mean anything close to having to work back through the basics of an OS or waiting and hoping for those basics to catch back up.

The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.

Finally I haven't seen a ton of talk here recently about either the question of MS's true regard for user privacy and security over time, or the turn towards explaining even less about what's in each update.

As a sysadmin keeping your users patched and updated is doing your job, following best practices and covering your ass. Maybe I could have been good at being paranoid if the last 15 years hadn't snuck up so fast, but it's way too late for that now too.

I don't want to take this toward a security discussion or try to advocate moving everyone to Mint before 2020 or something.

The standard best practices sysadmin approach just has these couple inconsistencies to me in this case. I know there are a ton of limits to my knowledge that would probably explain some of this.

Was looking through home lab topics. Curious if there'll be an update here after the crazy holidays have passed

@thanksajdotcom
yes

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@BRRABill I worked as a technician at a Ubreakifix repair shop for a short time.

Would that have been maybe an iPhone 4S, where you had to go in through the back cover and take almost everything apart to get at that screen?

From the iPhone 5 forward, the screens got pretty easy to change out pretty quickly after seeing a couple, but it's also definitely an adjustment starting to work with parts and screws that are 10% of the usual size. Once in a while, something like a flex cable could just seem determined to not stay in one piece.

When receiving a bad part means having to wait for another order rather than just going back to the shelf to look for a good one, that's another disincentive for diy too.

The other thing is, if it's not web-based, it's not likely I can enter something into my phone quickly when I remember it, and have it fit right into the whole. Or maybe have a lot of its functions persist in a tablet or phone interface, and still have enough to it that it's valuable enough to run on and add to in a desktop OS too.

I can't say I've messed with mobile Office enough to say why it's not that. Maybe what I'm really trying to say is I should just get all Macs and iDevices..

@scottalanmiller said:

We've used several things over the years. pmWiki and MediaWiki have probably been the strongest solutions but the most difficult for users to learn, for some reason, even though they use the same markdown as this forum, which does not seem to pose the same issues.

SharePoint's Wiki is a bit more WYSIWYG but takes more effort as it tends to mangle text if you don't know what to do. And the platform is much slower unless you invest tons more hardware.

OneNote is the best "document based" system but is problematic. It's extremely difficult to organize and results in document sprawl. It's a slow, cumbersome system to work with. The idea that you make a different "document" for different topics makes for almost certainly disorganized information.

Of the three wikis you mentioned, I only have some experience with SharePoint. It seemed like I had to find kind of special ways to manage a couple pretty basic things like anchor links, but like you said it's also pretty straightforward if everything's kept real simple.

I guess I like the idea of OneNote better than I like using it. It seems like I've tried to give it more of a shot a few times.

@JaredBusch said:

@ryanblahnik said:

@JaredBusch said:

Wiki's are horrible for general users.

I'd been thinking entirely of what you like for your own personal use.

But it'd be interesting to see what's worked for everyone for others too.

For my own personal use? I would setup a forum because I am used to them and they support syntax I have long been used to.

The problem is I would never set something up for my self. Well I probably would, but I would not use it well. I am not motivated well when it comes to that kind of thing.

To follow this out a little further, it sounds like maybe "email search + Google + knowing the location of the document that has what you need" might make anything else mostly unnecessary for you anyway?

@art_of_shred said:

We live in a predominantly Windows business world (user-facing). Get used to it, or fight the uphill battle and be regarded as out-of-touch with the everyday in IT.

I wouldn't be confident Windows will still be that in twenty years.

Not saying it definitely won't, and I'm not trying to crusade against Microsoft at all. I just like to try to keep encountering interesting tools that work easily. For me, Windows 8 and 10 don't represent anything that has a lot of reasons to stay dominant for a long time.

@Minion-Queen said:

I HATE Wiki's. Not great for multiple types of documents and media.

This is one of my biggest issues with wikis too. If you can't have much more than upload dates for those documents, again it's a hassle keeping track of what's been updated and what's current, and again another solution wants to be the only solution but isn't complete enough to pull it off well.

@JaredBusch said:

Wiki's are horrible for general users.

I'd been thinking entirely of what you like for your own personal use.

But it'd be interesting to see what's worked for everyone for others too.

@art_of_shred said:

...could be a SAM-alias...

haha..

What method(s) do you like for organizing info and maintaining references?

I like a lot about Office, until it's the only method used and everything's spread across dozens of documents. Being inflexible across mobile and Linux counts against it too, especially for OneNote.

I haven't really tried any mobile apps for that second reason either. And with some of the privacy concerns about apps like Evernote, I haven't been interested and never looked at them very closely, along with anything else that offers to suck everything into its cloud for me.

I tend to keep a handful of txt files and Office documents to keep track of a few different things, but without any other software to recommend, I guess that leaves wikis as probably my favorite overall.

Collabedit.com has been really handy a few times.

I can report some off and on Bluetooth issues on a Thinkpad from the Lenovo outlet. No wifi issues for me, but after resuming from hibernate I often have to uninstall the monitor to be able to adjust the brightness at all.

The price was pretty right. But yeah that was before Superfish etc. too. I put in more memory and an ssd, reinstalled Windows fresh and we'll see if anything catastrophic keeps it from holding me over for a while.

The display isn't too hot though, and makes me want one of those 1080 Toshiba Chromebooks for some browsing (and playing with Crouton).

Thanks @scottalanmiller. I don't have much experience to contribute to a lot of topics here, but think I'll keep an eye out and jump in where I can.

To the original question, I know it just seems harder to get an idea across in some situations - when it feels like you've completely summed up what you're expressing and it's not getting you very far, where can you go from there?

It's fun in those times like you mentioned above, when you can just spit it out how it comes out and it works for everybody. It seems like you stay on the right track of trying to figure out why your senses might have started tingling, to express that.

During some bigger impasses, sometimes it's helped me to try to see what might be in the way of relating. Maybe backing up and looking at a misconception about something I took for granted can help everything start shifting.

Hey everybody, I started looking through SMB IT Journal and found my way over to start looking around here too.

I'm pretty new to learning about IT. I started a little while back, focusing on networking and CCNA study material. I like it but have also gotten distracted and taken a number of tangents off into other areas.

Do you all have any books or resources you'd recommend toward getting some basics down cold in any area? I'd like to work toward solid understanding and try to avoid learning in ways where I might end up drifting down any of these paths mentioned here..

I'm open to learning about any area. Networking, Linux and system administration have been some of the most interesting to me so far, and I keep sensing I'll be needing to start a base in programming too.