Car Enthusiast Club [Now Motorcycle friendly!] - First thread to 150k! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bcredeur97]

1 hour ago, astn22 said:

what do yall think about mercedes killing off their coupes and wagons

sadness

[astn22]

38 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

sadness

yeah-those wagons had a special place in my heart. Going to Europe before and seeing all those awesome wagons wished we had more over here

[Radium_Angel]

13 hours ago, astn22 said:

 

 

what do yall think about mercedes killing off their coupes and wagons

In favour of what?

[iDeFecZx]

On 2/3/2023 at 1:02 PM, Radium_Angel said:

In favour of what?

EVs and SUVs most likely

[Radium_Angel]

3 hours ago, iDeFecZx said:

EVs and SUVs most likely

I'll grant the SUV, but can an EV not be a coupe?

[bcredeur97]

43 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I'll grant the SUV, but can an EV not be a coupe?

People just seem to rather SUV’s over anything else now. Convenient to have more space.

 

+ bigger car = more batteries

 

Cars are almost fully practical now. Fun isn’t really a consideration, at least offroad is though sometimes 

[AlwaysFSX]

12 hours ago, bcredeur97 said:

Fun isn’t really a consideration

If you can't have fun in it, you suck at having fun

[Radium_Angel]

So, guess who is trying to make a comeback?

 

https://delorean.com/

 

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

So, guess who is trying to make a comeback?

 

https://delorean.com/

 

Oh lord. Not again. No stainless, no care. 0-88 tho was a nice touch

[Radium_Angel]

Just now, Bitter said:

Oh lord. Not again. No stainless, no care. 0-88 tho was a nice touch

The original was iconic (no matter the history of the company) this...this is just another generic attempt as grabbing nostalgia.

In my town was one of the very few factory twin turbo'd DMC-12s ever made.

[bcredeur97]

9 hours ago, Bitter said:

Oh lord. Not again. No stainless, no care. 0-88 tho was a nice touch

With the cybertruck being as ridiculous as it is(assuming it does actually become a product), you know they could of done it too 

 

 

[AlwaysFSX]

45 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

(assuming it does actually become a product)

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

[VirusDumb]

Is the New MG that makes ugly SUVs and Chinese EVs different company?

from the mg that used to make British convertible Miata-ish cars in the 60s

[Bitter]

Upgraded the PC screen in the shop. It's all the way from last decade now! We can see customer AND car now. Lol. 22" 16:10 1680x1050 Dell 2213T. Way way better than the 1440x900 19" we had before, better contrast and colors make things a lot easier to read not mention just being bigger and brighter.

 

[vetali]

43 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Upgraded the PC screen in the shop. It's all the way from last decade now! We can see customer AND car now. Lol. 22" 16:10 1680x1050 Dell 2213T. Way way better than the 1440x900 19" we had before, better contrast and colors make things a lot easier to read not mention just being bigger and brighter.

At least that software makes use of the screen space. Our DMS looks like it was designed to support 800x600 and has a ton of wasted space with every menu opening up a new window.

 

Its amazing.

[Bitter]

15 minutes ago, vetali said:

At least that software makes use of the screen space. Our DMS looks like it was designed to support 800x600 and has a ton of wasted space with every menu opening up a new window.

 

Its amazing.

Yeah it's not terrible but it's not terribly intuitive to use.

https://www.shoppro.com/

https://www.shoppro.com/sp.htm

You know it's bad when they have to specify 'for Windows' still.

[bcredeur97]

35 minutes ago, vetali said:

At least that software makes use of the screen space. Our DMS looks like it was designed to support 800x600 and has a ton of wasted space with every menu opening up a new window.

 

Its amazing.

this is sadly still the case with so many softwares. 

Owning a 4K screen has too many downsides still, it feels like (unless it's HUUUGE)

 

1440p where it's at.

[vetali]

23 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Yeah it's not terrible but it's not terribly intuitive to use.

https://www.shoppro.com/

https://www.shoppro.com/sp.htm

You know it's bad when they have to specify 'for Windows' still.

And their webpage is butchered by an ultrawide monitor lol.

 

Ours was... fun trying to add a new guy we hired last month to the system. It also is very slow. Like filling out a multi point will take forever due to the thing lagging all the time. Not sure if its our server, or the software itself. Our IT guy is... an interesting fellow that I try to avoid at all costs

[Bitter]

1 minute ago, vetali said:

And their webpage is butchered by an ultrawide monitor lol.

 

Ours was... fun trying to add a new guy we hired last month to the system. It also is very slow. Like filling out a multi point will take forever due to the thing lagging all the time. Not sure if its our server, or the software itself. Our IT guy is... an interesting fellow that I try to avoid at all costs

Thankfully it's just the Shop PC and the Office PC (and an accounting laptop that's cursed to never install Windows Updates for some reason, they always fail and I hate that machine with a passion). I AM the IT staff. The monitor was for something at home but when I got it there was some damage, asked the seller to exchange and they just refunded and said no return needed. I'll get myself a different screen for my home thing, probably a 24" instead. So I'm like well it's not exactly what I wanted so I brought it to work. Between this, the Wifi upgrade to AC, and upgrading to a 4C4T i5 4570 (from i3 4150) the Shop PC is doing pretty alright (already SSD and 8GB RAM).

ShopPro is ran via a shortcut off of the Office PC which is a hacky way to do it but whatever it works, it just doesn't handle errors very well it just freezes then crashes out. With the faster more stable Wifi it's been crashing MUCH less. I tried to get an ethernet cable ran when the phone lines were being fixed but I got the 'why? we have wifi' and couldn't get my point across that a cable is better than magic radio waves. Ah well, it works well enough.

[bcredeur97]

16 minutes ago, vetali said:

And their webpage is butchered by an ultrawide monitor lol.

 

Ours was... fun trying to add a new guy we hired last month to the system. It also is very slow. Like filling out a multi point will take forever due to the thing lagging all the time. Not sure if its our server, or the software itself. Our IT guy is... an interesting fellow that I try to avoid at all costs

shameless plug: I work for an smallish IT company that has two datacenters and we host stuff for a couple hundred or so small businesses. Mix of old and new. but everything we host lives on SSD's no matter who it's for or what it is (we don't have customers who need to store crazy amounts of data... yet lol, most people need a TB or less so that makes it easy to do). We also do 30 second replications of every VM to physical another box and include 6 backups a day with a month of retention on everyone we sign up.

We'll also do RDS servers and such for people who have latency sensitive stuff (usually stuff that interacts with some database backend like your quickbooks and sage accounting softwares, etc. 

On top of all that we are transparent, people want to know where their data is and who has it. You can pick up the phone and call us... Nice benefit over just using some random cloud service.

In case y'all ever need anything, lol. Not that you have the power to make that decision where you work

[Bitter]

Oh, the funny thing about the program is....the password is NOT user set-able and it's the same password for every instance everywhere ever.

[bcredeur97]

6 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Oh, the funny thing about the program is....the password is NOT user set-able and it's the same password for every instance everywhere ever.

it's gotta be in a config file or in the database if it has one, somewhere. 

 

or maybe it's just that bad and the dev went "well i'll just put it in the encrypted code that no one can edit and that's what it'll be!"

 

Making a GOOD small business repair shop software would prob be a good niche market to get into....

[vetali]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

Thankfully it's just the Shop PC and the Office PC (and an accounting laptop that's cursed to never install Windows Updates for some reason, they always fail and I hate that machine with a passion). I AM the IT staff. The monitor was for something at home but when I got it there was some damage, asked the seller to exchange and they just refunded and said no return needed. I'll get myself a different screen for my home thing, probably a 24" instead. So I'm like well it's not exactly what I wanted so I brought it to work. Between this, the Wifi upgrade to AC, and upgrading to a 4C4T i5 4570 (from i3 4150) the Shop PC is doing pretty alright (already SSD and 8GB RAM).

ShopPro is ran via a shortcut off of the Office PC which is a hacky way to do it but whatever it works, it just doesn't handle errors very well it just freezes then crashes out. With the faster more stable Wifi it's been crashing MUCH less. I tried to get an ethernet cable ran when the phone lines were being fixed but I got the 'why? we have wifi' and couldn't get my point across that a cable is better than magic radio waves. Ah well, it works well enough.

Yeah, I tried being the in between IT guy (guy isn't even in the dealer at all, but hes part of the dealer group). Got chewed out by him once, now I refer all complaints/issues to his email. I've also been chewed out for streaming apple music (the only music service not blocked on wifi) due to "streaming taking way too much bandwidth"

1 hour ago, bcredeur97 said:

shameless plug: I work for an smallish IT company that has two datacenters and we host stuff for a couple hundred or so small businesses. Mix of old and new. but everything we host lives on SSD's no matter who it's for or what it is (we don't have customers who need to store crazy amounts of data... yet lol, most people need a TB or less so that makes it easy to do). We also do 30 second replications of every VM to physical another box and include 6 backups a day with a month of retention on everyone we sign up.

We'll also do RDS servers and such for people who have latency sensitive stuff (usually stuff that interacts with some database backend like your quickbooks and sage accounting softwares, etc. 

On top of all that we are transparent, people want to know where their data is and who has it. You can pick up the phone and call us... Nice benefit over just using some random cloud service.

In case y'all ever need anything, lol. Not that you have the power to make that decision where you work

Thats good to know, but they are set with what we got.... a cheap haswell refurb server from Dell, and that offloads to another server at a different dealer that uploads "to da cloud"

1 hour ago, bcredeur97 said:

it's gotta be in a config file or in the database if it has one, somewhere. 

 

or maybe it's just that bad and the dev went "well i'll just put it in the encrypted code that no one can edit and that's what it'll be!"

 

Making a GOOD small business repair shop software would prob be a good niche market to get into....

In theory yes, but getting shops and dealers to swap over would be a pain. A lot of places are set in their ways, and anyone shopping gets swallowed up by the "stalwarts" that advertise stuff like cloud, tablet integration with SMS/email capabilities, seamless warranty claims and parts inventory, and now "AI and machine learning" that is just stuff plastered on a Windows ME UI (ours isn't too far off from what @Bitterposted). Even editing stuff in the system involves going into a DOS like command center and having to input commands.

 

The AI and machine learning is a bunch of gross stuff that sales wanted and bought into. Its really scummy. It looks into what commonly goes wrong with cars at certain mileage and sends the customer trade in offers and crap at that mileage.

 

Their marketing teams are top notch. Pitch you on some miracle software, then once you sign... you see how garbage it is.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, bcredeur97 said:

it's gotta be in a config file or in the database if it has one, somewhere. 

 

or maybe it's just that bad and the dev went "well i'll just put it in the encrypted code that no one can edit and that's what it'll be!"

 

Making a GOOD small business repair shop software would prob be a good niche market to get into....

I'm fairly certain the database file isn't encrypted at all or that anything to do with this software is encrypted at all. One time we had an issue where it would open then close itself. Called up their support line, turned out there was an internet outage and the authentication server was down. Work around? Disable the internet, open it, wait a minute for it to time out on the phone home handshake, then turn the internet back on. It fails in a default to run without auth from the license server. I will say this, their support is pretty good, call in and get a call back within the hour or sooner. They'll just remote in and fix stuff most of the time, guy always seems thrilled when it's our shit broke cause we have decent machines with SSD's that are fairly fast. Last time it broke a few weeks ago he couldn't figure it out. We narrowed it down to a windows update breaking something with C++ in Windows maybe, that was the last update besides defender definitions. Did a restore back to before the update, reinstalled the update, no problems since. What's nice is....it's always the same guy. I think it's like a 4 person company lol.

[JoaoPRSousa]

20 hours ago, VirusDumb said:

Is the New MG that makes ugly SUVs and Chinese EVs different company?

from the mg that used to make British convertible Miata-ish cars in the 60s

 

MG Cars - Wikipedia

 

Same company.