Automatic vs Manual

I'm not currently in a driving job right now but I would gladly give one a try if/when I come back to it!

 

i have driven manuals for many years. i drove automatics for a few years.

both have advantages and of course disadvantages.

price, maintenance, downtime, etc.

in the end, no matter what, i prefer manuals. my job is of a somewhat local one in which i am in the city, and highway, and i still prefer a manual anyday.

 

The Detroit Auto transmission has a great down hill mode. You just set it and let the computers do all the work.

 

Its easier to pee in their pee cups with an automatic

 

I will die with a manual in my hand.

With that said, autos that we were issued by FFE in 2001 with a 500+ horse S60 engine was a Rockwell Meritor type. It featured a paddle on the column for manual gear selection as well as park, drive n and R etc.

That paddle was particularly useful in my style of crossing mountains, you could stay in one gear or another all day and night if you had a hill big enough for it. There was software within the transmission to settle a gear going up but it kept selecting the next higher coming down which is not welcome. I suppose the transmission provided my team driver, my spouse a chance to just drive without too much worry about the particulars of a manual (And she could handle and did manuals before and after) A couple of times that tractor got loose on ice into a jackknife and we came out of it nicely with that auto making rather large shifts to keep power on the wheels and moving at whatever engine speed we had on it.

The best thing about the auto was crossing the GWB in rush without trouble or stress. In most of my life with a manual I would pick a gear and get across there in one gear. Once past the east river we could kick it up and go if not already going.

The worst thing about the auto is according to manual it demands a hour shut off completely each week. We were a team truck and NEVER shut off, not even during fueling. So every few months the software buffer filled up and bricked just like a windows machine going blue screen and requires a heavy rotator wrecker to come get us back to a shop that has the computers to reboot and reinstall the #### thing. (Something I just did myself on the main computer a few days ago after explorer.exe failed on boot.)

Those tows cost FFE a customer or two and a whole bunch of money. It also revealed another problem when the VP of Operations saw the shape our cab was in. (Laundry in the pax seat for two people.. never had time to stop and do it... that got settled real quick)

I would use that knowledge of autos to teach temps at ADESA Little Rock to learn them enough to get the trucks to the barn and back and vice versa for the temps who don't know manual because all they drove was auto and taught them 5 gears in low range to get to barn and back they only needed two, something like third and low for the sales bay.)

I did notice the autos got increasingly complicated over the years, that's not welcome. Ford pretty much quit making manuals a few years ago and focused only on autos for their trucks.

I think that's quite enough for this post, I prefer a manual. However if you have a auto issued to you with manual gear control for ice and mountain work etc then you have the best of both worlds. If you do not? Well... find another company before you hit something or run off the downgrade.

 

When explorer.exe fails to execute on startup, you will see your background, but nothing else no icons and no taskbar. you can go into the task manager and manually launch it by choosing "run new task." Its rare on newer versions of windows, but sometimes the process will hang, and manually launching the executable should resolve that "no desktop icons" issue.

explorer.exe will load your data files, taskbar, and desktop icons/programs. Explorer.exe not executing is not catastrophic. One can go into the task manager and execute it and halt it, then execute it again freely without any damage done.

 

Eh, my problem was my own... forgetfulness. Running a 64 bit system that hung on other errors in addition to this one and then froze caused a problem. I went ahead and tossed the system disk into cdrom, booted from that and ran into a 64 bit barrier to system recovery. Since the machine had been up almost 3 years and has about 17000 hours on it of up time, I went ahead and formatted everything and rebuilt the raid 5. Took a hour at most, back online in 30 minutes after that and it's a matter of rounding up passwords, some of which were lost. Everything else was stored on the second computer and not lost.

If it happens again F8 would have created a chance to get into system recovery as it's supposed to do, but only if it's possible with the 32 bit system disk booting from CDrom via bios.

It don't matter to me if a machine went down or not. If it did, Im back up within a few hours at most once the updating and downloads of essential material is completed. Much of what I keep is on another machine, several spinner drives and also on the internet which isnt that interesting to anyone anyhow. Most people get worried if a computer failed to function properly becuase they do not take 3 months and go to a basic hardware software college course which will provide them all they need to know about computers in general. Building them in particular.

I do one thing, I hang on ferociously to windows 7. That is the limit as far as I am concerned, Microsoft has made clear that win10 systems are tied in with a privacy agreement to notify LEO's (Halfway through the 32 page agreement) if they detect activity online that might be illegal. Im pretty sure they bypassed win7 limitations with code in one of the updates to the same end by now. It's the freedom that I think is slipping away.

Anyway, the computer went out and I got it back well enough within a day. The passwords are written down into the safe on paper. So we wont be doing this again. For another two or three years or 50K hours, whichever comes first.

 

110% manual. I can't stand driving a truck with an auto. I don't feel in control of it.

 

Boss got a new style Cascadia daycab today as a demo. Didn't mind the auto. I could get used to it lol!

 

Automatic...leave it in downhill mode....elogs..... let the computer do all the work....

May as well rename this joint to thesteeringwheelholdersreport.com

Sheesh....