best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional world?

Both my new Dells came with XP/SP2 installed. A number of things about XP are stupid and annoying, but they are very reliable and seem to run fine for weeks at a time. The Dells themselves are crap, at least as far as packaging and ergonomics go.

John

If a program requests memory and does not return it when finished, it's the program's fault. If this leak causes the OS to crash because it hands out memory continuously until it falls over, it is the OS's fault (as windows may do). If the OS doesn't automatically free all the program's memory when it is killed, then you are the proud owner of Win9x!

That's only possible if the OS doesn't properly implement memory management and inter-process security. In other words, it happens on Win9x, but not on WinNT (including W2K and XP) or real OS's.

Hello Winfield,

Tell me about it. For the new lab PC they didn't give me a joice anymore. No, couldn't "downgrade" to NT this time, I had to accept XP. What a pain.

The worst is the persistent bugging for attention by bubbles. They threw in McAfee and it constantly splashes a stupid window over anything you are working on. "Your computer needs an update and is in danger blah...blah...blah". I turned everything off I could, didn't get rid of it. Next is an un-install I guess.

Same here. Not happy with XP at all. In the end none of these "operating systems" is as good as DOS.

Regards, Joerg

Fat chance of finding a PDF reader that works, and isn't written by those Adobe wankers?

martin

IIRC Eagle has not been around as long as the ones you mention. Inertia has a strong relation to the size of a company, so chances are high that a big company will not even know Eagle exists.

Most newcomers to PCB design seem to prefer Eagle, for whatever reason.

But what does it matter? If you want to work for a certain class of companies it makes sense to get yourself at least some experience in the software they like to see on your resume.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Webshop for PICs and other electronics Teacher electronics and informatics

Just wait till you need parts. I scrap almost every Dell I get my hands on because nothing fits other systems and the Dells all have similar component failures. Only one worked at all, and the on board IDE ports are bad. Most of them have bad electrolytic capacitors and blown power supplies.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I read in sci.electronics.design that Winfield Hill wrote (in ) about 'best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional', on Tue, 13 Sep 2005:

Do you run any app to clear trash out of the machine? I find WinXP SP2 requires the occasional spring-clean, not as often as Win98. I've not used Win2k.

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Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

It's not brilliant, it sort of goes, but it's not Adumby and it's free:

Paul Burke

Hello Win. Are you by any chance suffering the XP GDI Objects bug? This is where various lumps of software request, and are assigned, GDI handles. The bug allows some software to acquire thousands of handles, which drastically slows down the computer.

To look at this: Move to an empty space on the icon bar along the bottom, right-click, and select 'Task Manager' from the menu.

From the TM menu select 'processes', then 'view'. In the view menu, select 'columns', and untick everything except 'user name' and 'GDI Objects'. OK/close the view menu.

The processes window should now show a listing of software names, who is the user of that software, and the count of GDI objects assigned to each. Each count should be in the 10's for most software, with just a few 100's.

Make a rough mental record of the counts, and minimise the TM window. Throughout the day, open up the TM window and check to see if any software is grossly accumulating handles.

For example. I'm monitoring a particular prog. When loaded it has 95 GDI Objects assigned to it. When doing a certain action it gets about 10 more, but when closing the action it does not release them. In just a few minutes it is up to about 270, and people have reported 8000-10000 at the end of the day.... XP running seriously slugged.

I believe that Microsoft have issued a fix for this.

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Tony Williams.

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Tony Williams.

In article , John Larkin wrote: [...]

Ummm..... which is it "they are very reliable" or "seem to run fine for weeks at a time". If I had a car that only ran fine for weeks at a time, I'd want my money back.

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kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

Hello Jim,

With desktops you can often do that as you are usually free to configure them. Graphics cards etc. With laptops and their built-in HW there comes a point where a certain piece of HW in there just won't have any available NT driver. Then you are stuck with XP.

One would probably be fine if, say, the modem didn't work under NT. But for those rare cases where the ISP link goes down it's nice to be able to dial in and transmit that critical file to the client in time.

Regards, Joerg

I read in sci.electronics.design that Ken Smith wrote (in ) about 'best schematic capture/board editor program to learn for professional', on Wed, 14 Sep 2005:

In 2005, yes, but in 1945? Cars are more reliable than computers simply because they've been around longer. It took round about 50 years to get to 1945 level of reliability. Complain in 2030 if your computer is then not as reliable as your car is now.

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Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

*Computers* are reliable enough. It's some *operating systems* that aren't. And it's not that it's impossible to do better either. It makes people come back for the next version. It makes perfect economic sense.

Jeroen Belleman

Disable themes, problem gone. I have tried to reproduce this behaviour with no success. According to MS it only affects MFC child windows, so the problem is limited. There is a hotfix available.

Not to mention that a Ford Popular cost £390 in 1953, or about three-quarters of a year's wages for a craftsman. A corresponding car today costs about £8000 (Ford Fiesta, list price), or about a third of a craftsman's wages.

Computers on the other hand have plummeted in price over the period since the PC was introduced, from about half a junior engineer's annual wages to a tolerable night out at a halfway decent restaurant (well, slight exaggeration).

It's not surprising that quality and durability have not been priorities under such circumstances.

Paul Burke

That's because people in the First World have become almost too costly to employ.

Durability probably isn't a prime requirement, in view of the rate of innovation. But the point was well-made that the hardware is, by and large, far more reliable than the software. I do wonder whether this is partly due to the basic incomprehensibility of high-level languages.

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Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

I just had some new equipment installed in a very late model truck. All system controls are electronic. Brakes, engine, gears - even the power windows are controlled through a CAN bus. That's to say nothing of the hydraulic systems for the trailer and so forth. That particular model has 9 separate internal CAN busses and a gateway that I attach my equipment onto (read only, thank you. I can live without the liability issues).

The reason for the manufacturer (apart from the marketing hype) is easy

- the newer trucks have 2/3 less wiring, to say nothing of the fact that the only way it can be diagnosed is with manufacturers equipment (thus increasing their profit) and at a (usually) approved dealership. I know there's a bill wending it's way through the US congress to force all manufacturers to supply standard information for debug, but it's being fought tooth and nail by the manufacturers. That said, a fault in the onboard systems can cause major problems. I was watching a truck being moved into a service bay (engine dead, so it seems) that also had an air leak. The 'fail-safe' meant the brakes were locked, and they couldn't move the vehicle until they got out the HP air hose to keep some pressure in the system.

There *are* very stringent specs for automotive software, but whether they are sufficient is not something I am knowledgeable on.

Cheers

PeteS

The reliability of cars has been declining for quite a while due to the increase of on-board electronic and computer systems.

robert