A common attitude with Windows users here

[mikeymike]

The thing is, you just cant group all Windows owners into that category.

I agree, hence subject line!

[mikeymike]

Having done PC support and network administration for a few years, I can't take statements like that at face value. That's like saying "I was driving down the road and suddenly my car was sitting in the junkyard, wrecked. Man, those 'xyz' manufactured cars suck!"

Hear hear! :-)

My advice? Guys, you might hate PCs and want to spend as little time on them as humanly possible but - and I can't emphasize this enough - spend a little extra if you want the damn thing to work right.

It might not even be a case of 'spending a little extra', maybe less, but learn and research what hardware you should be getting!  I know a fair bit about x86 hardware but that doesn't stop me doing research every time I get a component!

PS - someone in the thread mentioned that XP has an "autoexec.bat". Ooooooooh no it does not!

It/NTx does, it just gets ignored by default without setting a few registry options to get it executed on startup.

[mikeymike]

From I hate MS
"If you look in the executables in the Windows (XP) directory, you find internal labels like 'ProductName: Microsoft Windows (TM) operating system; ProductVersion: 3.10'. There's even DOS 5.0 code with a 1981-1991 copyright date. What a great new product!"

That is probably the dumbest assumption I have EVER heard.  Does AmigaOS 3.1 have MS-DOS code in as well because the version is 3.1?  Does any v3.1 MS product therefore have to have MS-DOS code in then?  Is it reasonable to assume that the version number 3.1 could have been used and not necessarily had anything to do with Windows 3.1?  For example, MS *could* have used a version numbering system for Win32 starting from v1 and it not necessarily had anything to do with Windows 1.0!

Sure?
" . . . to find the bulk of Windows 3.10 and DOS 5 (all of it 16-bit code) under the hood of Windows XP makes you wonder about the design princibles that have gone into each 'new' version of Windows."

That is complete cobblers.  The DOS support in the NTx series is extremely minimal.  Only the most well-behaved DOS applications will work under NTx.  And a program written in native win32 code doesn't necessarily have to even include let alone be the native 16-bit code.

To sum up- "An internal memo amoung Microsoft developers mentioned 63,000 (yes: sixty-three thousand) known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. "

Software has bugs in!  AmigaOS has bugs in!  "Known defects" can be anything, things that no user is ever going to notice or be affected by!  I'm not saying MS software is "that much better" or anything, I'm just saying it's not perfect, which everyone here is perfectly aware of.

Your argument would be much better if for example you cited the bug fix list for NT4 SP6, which is a good 300 issues in length.  What about the original release plus 5 service packs previous to that service pack?  Those are issues that users are experiencing!