Calling all bigots

[Blake Barnett]

I do everything listed below on a Windows XP machine both at home and at
work.  I also do it on a Linux box in both places as well.  I enjoy
Linux more for everything except playing games.

My XP machine at home does not have nearly as many problems as Windows
98 did on the same hardware.  It is also much more flexible and friendly
than Windows 2000.  It requires reboots less than windows 2000 (which
improved greatly on the network changes rebooting, etc.)

Overall I'm pretty impressed with Windows XP.  It's still very opaque
and ridiculously configured by default (auto reboot on system errors??
c'mon!)  I've seen some flaky hardware problems (most Via KT/KX chipsets
in conjunction with NVidia cards), but for the most part, I usually
don't have to reboot unless I install a security update or driver
update.  The windows-update system, while cheesy, works fine.

My biggest gripe about Windows products still is and probably always
will be, the lack of an easily programmatic system configuration,
point-n-click just doesn't cut it for all system config stuff, and
diagnosing problems is like pulling teeth.   It certainly shouldn't be
the default for servers, and while the home users would want it
available, it should be optional.  

The registry is also one of the most horrifying beasts ever created.  It
also makes things work easily for the most part.

End of it all: No operating system is perfect, use what works best for
the situation.


On Mon, 2002-03-11 at 16:44, George Toft wrote:
> Same thing she used Win98 for (which crashed every couple days) -
> web surfing, e-mail, yahoo games, and kid games.
> 
> Nothing like me - Playing mp3's, burning CD's at 8x, downloading mp3's, 
> writing presentations in StarOffice, running vmware and surfing the net 
> simultaneously.  I've yet to see Windows whatever do that.  The Windows
> weenies at work can't even match that.  I can't get Win98 to burn a CD 
> at 4x on the same hardware (a Duron 600 mhz w/ 320MB RAM), yet I was 
> doing all of the above under Linux.  Windows was only burning the CD at 
> 4x and just barely.
> 
> George

-- 
Blake Barnett (bdb)  <blake.barnett@developonline.com>
Sr. Unix Administrator
DevelopOnline.com                 office: 480-377-6816

Learning is a skill, you get better at it with practice.