Anyone into Android programming?

[emjay]

Okay I'll write to the seller and let you know what they say and try to find a local computer repair shop to take a look at it.

I have to admit I don't like Microsoft, or indeed any company that gets too big for its boots and starts dictating what customers should want rather than what they do want, but at the same time I do trust and value your opinion so if you say Windows 8 is good, it's good  

Good is subjective.  Objectively, it is fast, and except for the annoying start menu which can be modified with a setting, there is little about it that's a big departure from Windows 7.

I'm pro-MS, because they've provided free tools that a hobby programmer can use: Visual Studio, .NET, DirectX, etc., which Apple has traditionally NOT been good at doing.  And Windows provides a very consistent framework that you can depend on being the same from computer to computer, which in my limited experience is not the case with Linux, which is much more hacky and individual (again, in my limited experience).

I know good is subjective, I just meant that I'd take your word for it I think I'd be happy with Windows 8 as long as I've got a touch screen because that's ultimately what it was designed for. Would you think it would be worth getting a 'Surface' - "the tablet that can replace your laptop" as the adverts say - for use with Unity or are they only any good for casual use? I'm sorry, I don't know much about them; how powerful they are or whether they have enough storage since they use SSDs I think.

Basically I'm just anti any company that has a closed ecosystem that tries to make you dependent on them. As soon as I see that happening I want to break free from it. So I assure you I am also anti-Apple. I've got a Kindle but as soon as I started really thinking about all this I decided to start buying e-books from other sources as well: Google, Nook, Kobo etc. Then when Nook decided to go the way of Amazon and make it so that you couldn't back up your ePub books - you could only buy them through their app but no longer download them into Adobe Digital Editions - I thought that was too much and decided no more Nook; at least Amazon never claimed that their book format was 'open' but Nook took what was designed to be an open book format and made it closed. I love Amazon but I want it to be my choice to buy from them, not my obligation, so for that reason I'd never buy a Kindle Fire or whatever that forces you to use Amazon's crappy app-store.

But the opposite side of this coin is that the more open a company is the more I like it. So from that point of view I can see what you mean, to some extent, about Microsoft. They have provided a lot of free and student edition software over the years, but as soon as you want to use their software for business or to make money, you have to pay. Fair enough but it was still within the context of a monopoly. But times are changing and I think they're becoming less and less of a monopoly and more and more open as a result of this smartphone revolution so I think there is hope for them; they know that there are many different devices out there and that they can't expect everyone to have only Windows devices, so they have started branching out onto those other devices, and perhaps their supporting Unity is part of that process.

I'm no expert in Linux though I was very happy that I switched to it. It's a joy not to have to bother with anti-virus software and to have a very simple, uniform way of installing software through repositories. There's a lot less software available, particularly games, but I've found that I actually prefer most of their alternatives to Windows software. For instance Gambas is an alternative to Visual Basic and it seems to me to be way more powerful. And Clementine is a much better media player than Windows Media Player, but again, just in my opinion. And finally, to address your point about consistency, yes I think Windows is more consistent than Linux, but if you have a computer with a Windows partition and a Linux partition if you try to read the Linux one from Windows it calls it a raw disk, whereas if you read the Windows one from Linux it has no problem - in other words Linux supports many different file systems, including NTFS.