A common attitude with Windows users here

[Tomas]

I have had ME installed on an old Athlon XP

well here it leaked ram as he*l... After a couple of days of uptime it had leaked so much that i could not even open a folder... It was partily due to a bug in via chipset but still....
Same computer was rocksolid on both winNT, 2k and linux.

[mikeymike]

@ bhoggett

I agree with you.  There's a bit of difference in history with AmigaOS and Windows, which gives AmigaOS the advantage when it comes to "user friendliness" (I put it in quotes, because what I'm about to say isn't about that per se) - Amiga users were attracted to the platform because they liked something about it.  People just end up buying Windows because there's no visible/realistic alternative.

[mikeymike]

But it is quite easy to make things worse at the moment i have a slight graphics problem with some games its not directx so it might be the nvidia drivers when i get time i might unistall them and reinstall newer drivers. if not its a windows problem windows allways dies in the end no matter what you do.

That is a mixture of inaccuracy and fatalism.  I've fixed major problems on Windows-running computers and they've gone on to run properly ever since.  I'm not saying that is always the case.

[mikeymike]

@ Tomas

So you are saying that all fault is on the user? Windows is not bloaty?

Where did you get that from?  Is this a game of "guess what we think this person might say and pretend that they've just said it"?

I agree with your second and third paragraphs.  Your third is a wonderful case of naivety after being reasonable/realistic :-)

I personally think that m$ should ditch explorer gui totally and instead start developing a new gui from scratch.. Explorer is what is causing most of the problems with windows this days

I disagree.  Explorer was perfectly good around NT4.  Just give it a few features, such as start > run autocomplete, and it would be fine.  Unintegrate IE would be a great course of action.  That's the source of many vulnerabilities and bloatyness.

[Tomas]

That is a mixture of inaccuracy and fatalism. I've fixed major problems on Windows-running computers and they've gone on to run properly ever since. I'm not saying that is always the case.

You need a bit of luck yep... some hw works decent while other cofigurations barely works at all.

I still say that WinXP and Win9x/me suck on any configuration though. 2K and NT is a much more solid OS  :-P

I disagree. Explorer was perfectly good around NT4. Just give it a few features, such as start > run autocomplete, and it would be fine. Unintegrate IE would be a great course of action. That's the source of many vulnerabilities and bloatyness.

I agree on that... it was ok in the old NT versions but since then too much useless and buggy features was added, which made it bloaty and unstable  :-(

[mikeymike]

You need a bit of luck yep

Not at all.  Knowledge and experience.  NTx helps a great deal as well, it takes out the unpredictability and fault-guessing of Win9x.

Having said that, WinNTx still manages to occasionally surprise me in weirdness, then see previous para :-)

some hw works decent while other cofigurations barely works at all.

I would say 50% of the time that's down to cheapo hardware, 25% of the time users that don't know how to configure it and/or Windows and 25% the fault of MS and hardware vendors in driver writing.

[Tomas]

Where did you get that from? Is this a game of "guess what we think this person might say and pretend that they've just said it"?

from this line: "You'll complain to the ends of the earth how slow/rubbish/unstable/whatever your WIndows installation is, but you are unwilling to do anything about it, eg. find out how to configure Windows correctly."

Cause i for one has tried everything i could to make XP useable for me

[mikeymike]

Cause i for one has tried everything i could to make XP useable for me

If you like, email me your problem, as much info as possible, and I'll try and help you solve it.

Regarding the rest of what you said - from the last site stats I saw for this site, at least 56% were using Windows. (IE users)  I would say 55.9% of those all have at least one significant, noticeable and solveable problem with their machine.  A very small percentage of those will actually try to solve it and ask for help.  The rest of that percentage will use that person's thread to moan about Windows.

[PPCRulez]

Well... Win2k is pretty stable and works ok. It's quite bloated though. And no matter how much memory you throw at it it seems to always have about the same memory free.

And DLL/registry hell is not very user-friendly.

When something goes wrong with Windows you have no choice but to reinstall. But with AmigaOS it's eaily fixable. And with Windows you have to reinstall most applications when you reinstall Windows, which don't have to do with AmigaOS.. just copy some libs at a worst case scenario.

I had Win2k running for about 2 years without reinstalling... suddenly one day may keyboard died (yes it just stopped working) which made Windows freeze, so I had to reset the computer, and that destroyed the Win installation... only a reinstall helped. Just because I had to reset. This would never happen to a decent OS.

And the crap shutting down procedure just sucks. AmigaOS is great in the way that you don't have to shutdown.. just press the powerbutton.

Regarding the intuitiveness... hmm Windows isn't exactly great.. I mean Shutdown is located under the Start-menu... really intuitive isn't it...

[Tomas]

If you like, email me your problem, as much info as possible, and I'll try and help you solve it.

nah I changed back to 2k/linux dual boot, so atm i am as happy as i can be using windows. But as i said... the problem iwth XP is that the gui is so much less responsive than NT/2k and some stability issues where explorer just tend to die.
I got it much faster than default install though, but still just to slow to me.

No man can fix this for me unless you change my perception on what is "fast/responsive"
I can see why 9x/me users are perfectly happy with XP though  ;-)  XP is a much better OS than any flavour of 9x

[mikeymike]

Well... Win2k is pretty stable and works ok. It's quite bloated though. And no matter how much memory you throw at it it seems to always have about the same memory free.

Stop adding memory and start working out why it's using all that memory!  My machine, with all the stuff I want loaded on startup uses 64MB RAM.  That's 30MB less than it would do had I not configured it properly and still loaded the extra stuff I wanted.

DLL hell

Has long expired, unless you choose to run the absolute worst software on the planet.

When something goes wrong with Windows you have no choice but to reinstall.

That's only due to your unwillingness to learn how to solve the problem properly.

I had Win2k running for about 2 years without reinstalling... suddenly one day may keyboard died (yes it just stopped working) which made Windows freeze, so I had to reset the computer, and that destroyed the Win installation... only a reinstall helped. Just because I had to reset. This would never happen to a decent OS.

If that is truly what happened, then more happened than you think to cause Win2k to die completely.  I've never seen NTx just "give up the ghost" and die, without heavy provocation.  That's out of at least 80 Windows NT4/2k machines I set up.

[that_punk_guy]

I use Windows 2000 on my server and as my desktop OS and it is rock solid. What Microsoft don't seem to understand is that the home user is entitled to as much security and stability as professional users.

The entire 9x/ME series seems like a waste of time in retrospect, when they had a usable OS like Win2K I really don't see the logic in selling an inferior product to home and non-admin office users. And when it finally came time to offer an NT based Windows to the mainstream market, they piled a sack-load of useless crap on top of the NT5 framework and called it XP.

You can fix things with Windows 2000. I've had to re-install Linux, that great figurehead of stability, more often than 2K. As regards other versions of Windows... I really don't think you can blame the user when the way the 9x series worked was hopeless. Things break for absolutely no reason under those releases.

[KennyR]

mikeymike wrote:
You'd need to tweak that analogy a bit to replicate the behaviour here. "When I buy a car, I expect it to run with zero maintenance. If however it does need maintenance, I'll choose to just whinge about it not working all the time, and not bother to do anything about it. Also, all cars from that manufacturer must also be defective in exactly the same fashion. It could not possibly by my fault in the slightest, or I never do anything wrong".

If the car was obviously badly designed, I would be justified in this view, don't you think?

[that_punk_guy]

mikeymike wrote:

When I buy a car, I expect it to run with zero maintainance. If I have to spend every weekend fixing it or pushing it in the mornings, it's time to buy a new car.

You'd need to tweak that analogy a bit to replicate the behaviour here.  "When I buy a car, I expect it to run with zero maintenance.  If however it does need maintenance, I'll choose to just whinge about it not working all the time, and not bother to do anything about it.  Also, all cars from that manufacturer must also be defective in exactly the same fashion.  It could not possibly by my fault in the slightest, or I never do anything wrong".

There's some difference between changing your car's oil, and ripping the engine out as part of regular maintenance. ;-)

[mikeymike]

If the car was obviously badly designed, I would be justified in this view, don't you think?

All operating systems have noticeable flaws.

[mikeymike]

There's some difference between changing your car's oil, and ripping the engine out as part of regular maintenance. ;-)

If you're not spending your spare time pouring ice cream into it, or ripping the engine out for the fun of it, you won't have to with NTx, provided it is set up properly in the first place.  If a car's engine isn't tuned properly in the first place, you'll get countless problems.  However, there is a justifiable point of counter-argument here - PC suppliers do not set Windows up properly at all!