Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: mikeymike on November 02, 2003, 08:02:36 PM
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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.
Another eg. of course is use a different OS :-)
Willing to whinge, unwilling to learn. That's what I think it comes down to.
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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. :)
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@mikeymike
I agree with you there. Windows has plenty of flaws, but the majority of complaints are down to nothing more than user ignorance.
The ironic thing is that so many also talk about how "intuitive" AmigaOS is, without bothering to consider that the intuitiveness comes from familiarity. Stick someone not used to AmigaOS in front of an Amiga and make them use it for a while, and 9 out of 10 will find the experience a nightmare.
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bhoggett wrote:
@mikeymike
I agree with you there. Windows has plenty of flaws, but the majority of complaints are down to nothing more than user ignorance.
As a professional developer, I can honestly say that its "always the user"! ;-)
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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.
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.
:-)
I have had windows 2000 for about 7 to 8 months on this machine without reinstalling a record for me.
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I have this Win2K installation that hasn't been slow or degenerated once... and I installed a year ago. It's pretty much down to the user if the OS gets slow. I must say that Windows does what it is supposed to do, but no fun factor as with AmigaOS.
forgot to mention, above stated computer is heavilly used everyday. ;) So it isn't just a server ticking away.
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Bhogget wrote:
I agree with you there. Windows has plenty of flaws, but the majority of complaints are down to nothing more than user ignorance.
The ironic thing is that so many also talk about how "intuitive" AmigaOS is, without bothering to consider that the intuitiveness comes from familiarity.
I can only half agree. Amiga is intuitive because it's simple. To install a shared library you copy it to LIBS:, for example. No more, no less. On Windows, the concepts of registry and the infamous "dll hell" are not intuitive to anyone, even people who are familiar.
I think the fact that people who have used Windows for almost a decade have to re-install a whole program to compensate for a missing file or a broken registry key says everything about Windows we need to know. And it will never, ever improve, either, just hide itself under yet another layer of complexity to make it better in the short term and worse in the long term.
Most of the people here will jump on Window's fairly massive faults because they want to believe that it's crap. I however, think it is crap. And that, of course, is an opinion, not a fact.
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So you are saying that all fault is on the user? Windows is not bloaty? :-?
I turned off every effects/fatures i could on my XP install, the gui still lacks the response you would expect from a decent OS. NT4 running on older hardware is WAY more responsive than XP on a modern pc with all effects/features and such crap removed.
And btw... you should not need to edit the registery/use 3th party programs to be able to turn off the unusable/annoying features that slows the whole system down
I just cant wait for longhorn... i tested the pre beta here the other day, it is WAY worse than the alpha of XP was... Is totally unusable on any computer with less than 512meg ram.
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
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Oh, of course its the users fault, we just love editing the windows registry, removing ad-ware and spy-ware, defragging, devirusing, streamlining the startup, dealing with IRQ's and hardware conflicts, all from a noisy arsed box. Why should I go back to Amiga? :-D
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I have had ME installed on an old Athlon XP for
over 2 years (original install) and it's been
fine. The OS is kind of messy and clunky, but
it's fairly stable and certainly doesn't need to
be reinstalled every other Tuesday.
Windows is OK for what it is - a commercial
McProduct for the 'broader' masses. I don't go
to 'Taco Bell' expecting gourmet...as long as
it's cheap and does the job...Just keep Windows
relatively tidy, don't install millions of
unnecessary junk apps and it'll work "as
advertised".
-edit-
Plus Windows is great for ET and Q3...:P
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I think I'm going to vomit :-P
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I'll give credit, where credit is due. 2kPro kicks @$$. I haven't had a LICK of problems with it in my two years of use. Most of my installs were 'cos of replacement HDDs (NEVER BUY Western Digital. I have replaced 3 REFURBISHED drives, all sent to me as replacement to a NEW one still under warranty!!!). No my roommate, she's got a crappy XP box. I know I've installed it for her at least 4 times since we've lived together and that's been about 4 months.
Granted, she's got a REALLY SH!TTY onboard everything PC, with a noisy, slower-than-dog-sh!t-HDD, but still....
:-o
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> 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
Well, I installed Gentoo!
> Willing to whinge, unwilling to learn. That's what I think it comes down to.
I don't know if learning linux, and compiling all your own software can be considered "unwilling to learn" :-P
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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".
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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.
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@ 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.
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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.
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@ 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.
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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 :-(
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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.
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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
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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.
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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...
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If you like, email me your problem, as much info as possible, and I'll try and help you solve it.
nah :P 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
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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. ;-)
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If the car was obviously badly designed, I would be justified in this view, don't you think?
All operating systems have noticeable flaws.
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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!
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How about "Windows is hard to use properly, because it is so big and complicated".
I'm not saying AOS is perfect, but at least it is smaller and therefore easier to figure out.
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How about "Windows is hard to use properly, because it is so big and complicated".
Change "use" to "set up", and I'd agree with you. My family all have PCs set up by me, they have no problems that come down to the OS or software at fault. They ask me for help with how to do something in particular because they're not particularly computer-techie, but that's about it.
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Yes, maybe that is a better word, although I do count installing or replacing hardware as "using", as it's something the average user can and should be able to do by himself. Most of the time things work ok, but if there are problems Windows' or the hardware's help files or manuals are rarely of any assistance.
A properly set up system for example at a school or in other static use is ok though, I agree.
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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.
I've turned off all services that I don't use. But the fact is that if you put 256MB RAM in a Win2k box and then put 384MB in the same box with the same configuration you don't get 128MB extra free physical memory. It probably caches stuff... (god knows what)
BTW 64MB is still an insane amount of memory for an OS.
Regristry hell is still very much present even if the DLL problems isn't as bas as they used to be.
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.
Well.. it's not unwillingness... If it were easy to fix a problem with Windows no one would have to reinstall it. Not many users of windows have never had to reinstall the 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.
Yes, that is what happened. I just pressed the reset button after a complete system freeze due to the keyboard dying. After that it wouldn't boot, in fact I couldn't even get to the Safe-mode. Sure I've had to reset the Win2k machine with the button a few times before and nothing had happened before, but this time it just went dead.
But other than that Win2k is quite stable, sure it crashes sometimes, but not that often.
The day that I tried Opera for windows was the day that I started using Windows more and more, and less of AmigaOS. I really don't like IE. And when I got DOpus for Windows it got even better.. I don't have to use Explorer for file management anymore.
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I think you guys are not seeing the forest
because of the trees.
You are forgetting that 'Windows' was/is supposed
to be the system for the masses.
Well the 'Masses' don't know squat about
computers. How do you expect them to keep them
running.
Windows is a very good idea with a very bad
implamintation.
If Windows was actually what it is supposed
to be then it would not need fixing every other
week, remember 'The Masses'.
I'm just a 'not very well informed' hobbiest.
But atleast when I screw something up on my
Amiga I can fumble around and fix it, not so
with windows.
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mikeymike wrote:
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.
Another eg. of course is use a different OS :-)
Willing to whinge, unwilling to learn. That's what I think it comes down to.
I've had every OS that I have ever used crash on me at one point or another. Be it Windows, Linux, MacOS or Amiga dos. All operating systems can and will crash and that's a fact of life. I think that the biggest problem I have with Windows is Microsoft. I have always been suspicious of how they do business and treat other business's. I think a lot of other people dislike Windows for that reason too.
Here is a good and funny article about one mans hate of Microsoft: Why I Hate Microsoft. (http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html)
I am not 100% against the OS as it is easy to use and does what I want it to do (as do some other OS's.)
I think I would like Windows more if Microsoft took the bloat out or gave me the ability to not have to install alot of that bloat (ie. Internet Explorer.)
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All operating systems have noticeable flaws.
Very true! But some have more flaws than others.
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Learning Windows is a waste of time anyways, and neither interresting nor fun.
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I think you guys are not seeing the forest
because of the trees.
You are forgetting that 'Windows' was/is supposed
to be the system for the masses.
Well the 'Masses' don't know squat about
computers. How do you expect them to keep them
running.
Ah, the classic "I know the advertising is pure lies but I'll accept it because it forms a convenient excuse". Computers still aren't 100% accessible for the masses. TBH, I think it's the masses that have to undergo the more radical advances in order to use computers efficiently. They're still seen as "geek toys". It'll take a good generation or two for that to change.
But atleast when I screw something up on my
Amiga I can fumble around and fix it,
That's because you're willing to learn with your Amiga, because you chose it through liking it in the first place.
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Learning Windows is a waste of time anyways, and neither interresting nor fun.
Just please don't let me hear you whinge that something doesn't work then!
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Mikeymike: 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.
That would be easier if Windows didn't ignore or discard your changes from time to time. Ever try to use the "View: Like current folder?" It usually takes a restart before it actually starts viewing like the current folder, and a lot of times Windows just "forgets". Every time I re-install Windows, it takes 3-4 days before Windows "learns" how I want it to be configured. I suppose if I went into RegEdit, I could force it to learn faster, but hey...
It would also be nice if Microsoft didn't change everything all the time. Most people don't want to spend days re-learning everything just because of a critical update. Microsoft changed their driver wizard in Win98 a while ago, and now a lot of Win98 drivers don't work anymore, saying that the drivers are not designed for your hardware. I've had a lot of customers return hardware because of that, and from personal experience with my own Win98 machine, I know it is NOT their fault. It's because Microsoft is still innovating a product that has a set methodology and SHOULDN'T change. But if they didn't, IE6 and other newer MS products may not work. Between IE and older drivers, guess which product won?
Willing to whinge, unwilling to learn. That's what I think it comes down to.
For home users, perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that the people who buy software for business purposes are RARELY the people who actually use the software. My boss spends tens of thousands of dollars on software I tell him NOT to buy, and all the resulting problems are my responsibility.
BTW, I am no longer working there, and am looking for a new job. I certainly won't work anywhere that used that same crap software, that's for sure.
KennyR: 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.
I've used that same analogy when desribing the "professional" machines I use at work. Our Kodak DLS printer has a problem just about every week, and when a technician comes in to "fix" the problem, there's really nothing they can do. That's why they charge $10,000 a year for maintenance contracts. If we hadn't bought it, we would be up to over $60K in repair bills by now, and the machine is only two years old.
Meanwhile, my old car, a Saturn, worked flawlessly for 3 years with only oil changes, chassis inspections, and new brakes. Compare that to the awful BMW iDrive machine, which was almost completely software controlled, and in some cases the engine wouldn't even turn off because the car couldn't tell if the magnetic key was removed or not. I think it had to be totally recalled, but I haven't followed up on that.
As a professional developer, I can honestly say that its "always the user"!
If you're a good programmer with lots of experience with UI design, than I would agree. This does not reflect the industry standard. One product I use at work refused to download new photo orders from the company's server. It gave no error, it just said "no new orders". After playing phone tag for a couple days, I got to talk to the lead programmer, and he said I should delete half the orders in the order archive and try again. He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Since the software automatically deletes orders after one month, or if your computer is out of disk space, I never would have thought that manual maintenance is required, especially since we DON'T want to delete the order archive. We also had plenty of disk space. I should repeat that the software gave no error, and the programmer treated me like I should have known better.
It's not always the user's fault. Nobody is right all the time, especially the people who write the software I use at work. Unfortunately, most low-volume, "professional" software companies seem to operate like this. So long as the bosses buy the software (and never use it, themselves), the problems just keep getting worse.
Oh, of course its the users fault, we just love editing the windows registry, removing ad-ware and spy-ware, defragging, devirusing, streamlining the startup, dealing with IRQ's and hardware conflicts, all from a noisy arsed box. Why should I go back to Amiga?
Well said. Maybe if Microsoft didn't make so many "hidden" parts of the registry that allow spammers to wedge in things that don't show up in MSConfig and TweakUI, we wouldn't have so many spy-ware problems. Viruses I'm not too sure about. I have my Active-X controls set to "prompt" and haven't had a virus in years. Then again, how many people know what an Active-X control is? What starter book will tell you that right-off without bombarding you with 400 pages of fluff about how wonderful Microsoft is?
Methuselas: I'll give credit, where credit is due. 2kPro kicks @$$. I haven't had a LICK of problems with it in my two years of use. Most of my installs were 'cos of replacement HDDs (NEVER BUY Western Digital. I have replaced 3 REFURBISHED drives, all sent to me as replacement to a NEW one still under warranty!!!).
Win2K is great. My dad's XP system drives me nuts and I refuse to upgrade. All I do is Photoshop and e-mail, anyway.
I have to contest your advice about WD. I will *ONLY* buy Western Digital. I bought three Maxtor drives and all three went belly up within 6 months. They were all replaced with refurbished drives (every company I know does that). I've also seen 2 IBM drives give up the ghost, as well as a Fujitsu and Samsung. I've personally owned 4 WD drives and never had a problem.
HD's are the least reliable component in your PC. All drive manufacturers have their issues. The only thing you can do is make backups. I have at least 2 full backups of my system at all times, and keep them up to date within 2-3 weeks. I keep daily backups of work in progress and haven't lost anything in... years, I think.
Mikeymike: 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.
Sounds fair. Every time someone asks me to fix their computer, they have some cheapo motherboard where drivers are just NOT available. That usually means re-installation is impossible, or something to sweat over. ;-)
PPCRulez: And DLL/registry hell is not very user-friendly.
I've always felt that DLL hell is largely the fault of developers. DLLs should be local to the application folder, and you should check version numbers, first. I've never run into DLL hell except for a few oddball apps under NT4, and a wealth of idioticly programmed freeware apps. Ever recall having to download Allegro libraries or "Glut32.dll" to get something to work? Morons.
Mikeymike is right. DLL hell is a thing of the past.
Mikeymike: I've never seen NTx just "give up the ghost" and die
I have. To be fair, I think it was because of bad SCSI drivers, but that's not my problem.
Attempting data recovery from an unbootable NTFS partition is hell. NT4 doesn't have a recovery console, Win2K won't let you access any files because you don't have permission, and re-installing Windows on top of itself makes several duplicates of your user profiles, which you can't remove unless you do it from the registry (the GUI tool won't list the profiles, but the system still writes files to them). There is a way to change the security permissions so you can read files from the Recovery Console, but I never got it to work. It still tells me Permission Denied, even when I log into the admin account. Windows security is very weird. The only thing worse is Windows networking.
Lesson learned: always use FAT for your boot partition and NTFS for other partitions, 'cause if the boot partition dies, you might have to transfer the HD to another machine to read your files on C:.
If the car was obviously badly designed, I would be justified in this view, don't you think?
Yes. Bad quality is less tolerated in the automotive market, and competition is much more fierce. Then again, you don't have to worry about "special" gas formulated just for your car, or get service from just one machanic in the country.
PPCRulez: Yes, that is what happened. I just pressed the reset button after a complete system freeze due to the keyboard dying. After that it wouldn't boot, in fact I couldn't even get to the Safe-mode.
Oh, I've seen that plenty of times when plugging in USB card readers. Windows automatically reassigns the drive letters, and... POOF... even safe mode doesn't work.
USB card readers are the work of the devil. I can't tell you how many customers bring them back, and *I* can't get them to work, either. Very, very bad manufacturer support, that's what!
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Waccoon wrote:
Oh, I've seen that plenty of times when plugging in USB card readers. Windows automatically reassigns the drive letters, and... POOF... even safe mode doesn't work.
USB card readers are the work of the devil. I can't tell you how many customers bring them back, and *I* can't get them to work, either. Very, very bad manufacturer support, that's what!
Which reminds me of another Win2k problem. I have a digital camera a Minolta which is a standard USB Mass Storage Device. It worked perfectly with my Win2k machine for over a year. Tried it on my brothers Win2k machine it found the driver but then nothing happend, the machine just stood there doing nothing, no error messages or anything, it just didn't work. After I had reinstalled Win2k the exact same thing happened on my machine. So, now I can't use the camera on my Win2k machine, but it works perfectly on my Linux machine and always has.
To make this even worse, the camera now works on my brothers win2k machine after he reinstalled win2k.
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Waccoon said
Compare that to the awful BMW iDrive machine, which was almost completely software controlled, and in some cases the engine wouldn't even turn off because the car couldn't tell if the magnetic key was removed or not. I think it had to be totally recalled, but I haven't followed up on that.
(http://www.paranos.com/humour/bmw.jpg)
:-D
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@PPCRulez:
Oh, boy... I've seen this problem way too many times. Windows is VERY fussy about the order in which you attach hardware to the machine. Some devices, like my Epson scanner, require you to boot up the computer with the scanner unattached or turned off, and THEN attach or turn on the scanner. If the scanner is on while the system is booting, the TWAIN driver says the scanner can't be found. I have an HP printer which is a real pain to install. The driver must be installed first with the printer unattached. If you plug in the printer before installing the driver, it will COMPLETELY mess up your machine, and you'll have to delete lots of USB entries in the device manager just to clean house so you can try again. Once the driver is installing, you'll have to plug in the printer ONLY when it tells you to, so it can autodetect it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. It took me a few hours just to install the driver the first time I bought it. If it wasn't such a damn good printer, I would've brought it back!
Try this:
- With the device plugged into your usual USB port, open the Device Manager. Find the entry for the camera and remove it. Unplug the camera, and THEN click Scan for Hardware Changes. Do not click Properties and try to Reinstall Driver. That hardly ever works with USB devices in my experience, even though it works with everything else.
- At this point, you're at the mercy of the driver. Sometimes you have to install the driver first, sometimes after. Sometimes you have to have the camera plugged in before the computer starts, sometimes after. I have a feeling that since the OS recognizes the camera as a Mass Storage Device (which it shouldn't), you might have to install the driver first, then plug in the camera. Scanners, printers, and cameras usually don't install by plugging in the device first, and then getting a prompt for the driver. Card readers, USB drives, and low-speed devices usually WILL install this way. You'll have to experiment.
- See if your manufacturer has a more recent driver for downloading. Some downloaded drivers are more basic than the ones you get on CD-ROM, EVEN if they are the same version number! Downloaded drivers may have updated directions on what order to do things. Manufacturers tend to change their mind about installation all the time.
Also keep in mind that high-speed USB devices like scaners and digital cameras (unlike mice, keyboards, and joysticks), probably have to be plugged into a root USB port, and must always be put into the SAME port every time you use it. If you swap ports, you'll have to re-install the driver for each USB port, and if you use a USB hub, chances are you'll have communication problems, or the device will not work at all. When I have my scanner plugged into a hub, it will scan 25-40% of an image an then freeze. In a root port is works flawlessly. Only the three fingered salute will shut down the TWAIN driver when it freezes.
Microsoft's USB standard absolutely sucks. Many manufactuerers try to "fix" it by doing strange stuff with their drivers, and that just seems to make the problem worse. My HP printer is the hallmark of horrible, horrible driver design (it also installs junkware, like a desktop folder that will automatically upload pictures to HP's server for sharing to family members. You have to explicitly delete it AFTER it's been installed. Lovely).
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@ Waccoon
Actually the Minolta Camera I have doesn't have any special drivers. You don't have to (nor can) install any drivers. When attached it uses Microsofts USB Mass Storage Device driver. I will try some of your tips though and see if it works.
I've gotten used to using it under Linux now, since Win2k can be such a pain in the ass sometimes.
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I had a somewhat similiar problem with a USB device, but under XP. I plugged it in, Windows found it but nothing happened, I though that I might have to reboot the computer for it to come up under Explorer but no, nothing happened. I fooled around for a while and suddenly it just appeared, and since that it has worked fine.
Strange and annoying. Oh, and it too worked perfectly under Linux. It's not strange that people get annoyed with windows, it's totally unlogical, I have used Windows far more than I have used Linux but I still think in Linux it is easier to understand what's going on, but on the other hand, linux structure of files is a mess
/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin
And about the "having to reinstall the OS" problems, this has never happened to me in any OS except Windows, I usually reinstall Linux every now and then because it's grows huge with programs I'm installing and testing, but Windows has actually crashed on me once and showed a message telling me I had to reinstall windows.
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Microsoft changed their driver wizard in Win98 a while ago, and now a lot of Win98 drivers don't work anymore,
The reason for that is simple i.e. Windows 9X's VXD drivers doesn’t work with Windows NT5.x style driver modelling.
Lesson learned: always use FAT for your boot partition and NTFS for other partitions, 'cause if the boot partition dies, you might have to transfer the HD to another machine to read your files on C:.
One could have another cut-down installation of WinXP/Win2K to rescue the main boot drive.
No one has forced you to upgrade to Win2K/XP IF Windows 98 does the work for you.
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I have a better solution.
FDisk windows and install Zeta :-D (BeOS R6 - released yesterday).
Seriously though. I do find that a lot of the problems I've encountered is due to hardware not sticking to the standards, usb stuff especially seems to be bad for this. And whoever came up with USB ADSL modems should be shot, his or her body drawn and quartered, then force fed to the person who ok'd the idea. I have had hellish problems with some systems when using ADSL modems. I can fix just about anything given a little time, some space and a sound proof room (The air goes blue when dealing with windows and usb stuff). But these things I generally find are the worst to fix.
Win2k for me is fine, I use it as a games system and very rarely have problems with it. That said, I have had no end of issues with WinXP and I deliberately downgrade any system I come accross with this attrocity installed on it when I'm allowed, simply because there are so many niggles with it (Not big issues, but very annoying problems that I can never fully track down) that simply don't happen with win2k, well, not nearly with the same regularity at any rate.
My main OS is BeOS R5 with Bone Installed, I use it because beyond games, it does everything I need, when I mess things up, its easily fixable, libs are in a libs folder, commands are in /bin drivers are in their correct places etc etc, its basically easier to go through and find/correct issues simply because the layout of the OS is designed to be more human friendly, much like AmigaOS in that regard. Windows were on to a winner with Win2k, and as much as the Amigan in me hates to say this, its a damned fine OS, the best they ever built imo, XP however, feels like someone put a throttle on that good work whenever I've encountered it.
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And whoever came up with USB ADSL modems should be shot, his or her body drawn and quartered, then force fed to the person who ok'd the idea.
I totally agree there! The ethernet standard is WAY better! USB is slower, more unstable and restrict you usually to just on or 2 OS, which is usually Windows and some few times Mac.. :-(
I agree with the_leander btw... BeOS was the best OS on x86! It is WAY better than both windows and linux on the desktop side... stable as hell, easy to use, no reboots needed, good with multimedia and so on... Too bad m$ killed beinc.. it could have had a very promising future :cry:
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I can honestly say that its "always the user"!
Of coarse Developers and Software/System Designers never make mistakes :P~ BS!
Consider this problem though. Our Win2k print server went kaput when the PSU died. As a result MS Word took 10-15 minutes to open a document because it kept trying to poll the printer server. User intervension helped by unmapping all network printers. But it is hardly caused by "User Error". Given the number of problems like this that don't have an obvious fix and require at least some level of system knowledge to fix I think users of Winblows have a good reason to complain.
The OS not user friendly from top to bottom and when some has a deadline for a document and they are faced with this they have good reason to be angry.
They paid good money for a product. I am not sure that the car analogy works for new cars though. :P Would you keep buying new cats then selling them untill you found one that didn't brake down on you frequently?
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I tried to use BeOS. But there wasn't enough software for desktop stuff like GOOD movie players or word processors. I use linux now with Ximian and it leaves BeOS for dead in the desktop areana.
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Bah, WindowsXp runs fine. Got it running on 128Megs of RAM here cause I don't let crap run in the background (1.4GHz P4) , except for game demos I love to play with, it's a pretty static set-up (DL milestone firebird releases though). I just wish I could un-install all those windows extras. 90% of the time I'm using Photoshop, Firebird, X-Chat, Star Office, AIM occasionally (use to use Trillian for it all). Got some games, old as Sim City 2000, not much all that new really though. VersaCad, REBOL, Bryce, Truespace et cetera.
Windows is stable, never had the system crash on me (firebird has crashed several times, and various word/office programs but they never bring the system down) and it runs reasonably quickly except when two users log in (almost never, since it's one terminal) . I use XP-AntiSpy, Ad-Aware 6, Regclean et cetera and the system is pretty clean (not much launched at start). Sits behind a giant router/firewall and generally lacks major bugs/virii needs to have its oil changed every now and then, but never had to re-install Xp, never had bad drivers either (usually try manufacturer's first). Windows ME was a nightmare as my DVD drivers conflicted with my DSL software irreparably.
No major qualms, I just like the concept behind the AmigaOS a lot more. Light, efficient, fast, Very simple, frankly things are labelled more plainly
(*nixes are horrible at this) centralized distribution
(Windows also has that advantage over Linux, there are very few versions of Windows, which are largely compatible, Linux's many GUIs and shells and repeat tools are not standardized, outside the realm of POSIX, which is great, if you're a programmer, which I'm not) Amiga has a very customizable GUI, Windows is customizable with a lot of 3rd party hacks (much like Amiga frankly) But they tend to slow down my PC, with it's Pentium 4 and it's 128megs of RAM, like molasses, so I don't use 'em. Seems most peopel with a fast(ish) amiga use MUI, and some other stuff to make their desktop look nice.
ED: PS: I've never used Win2K really, maybe I'm missing out on something here... the school uses it, but I see no major differences upfront from WinXp Pro with no bundled software... can't lock taskbar
:-x
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Without bothering to read the entire thread (I'm sure I can predict how this one will turn out ;-) ) I'd just like to say that overall, I kinda like XP. I've heard so many horror stories about it here on the forums, but I just don't get it. I've installed XP on various machines, including a 200Mhz K6 with under 100megs of ram and had no problems (aside from the fact that it was a bit slugish).
Having said that, there's still some thing about it that drive me nuts. The drive lettering for example! Isn't it about time we got rid of that ancient system and switch to volume labels to reference drives? Or a REAL command line shell, similar to csh or AmigaShell? DOS just doesn't cut it!
- Mike
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(chuckle chuckle).....
I think this has turned into a general gripe
session about windows and lost track of
Micky's origonal statement.
Everyone has their gripe with Windows.
What you need to do is go back to the source.
TV ads.. All the computer manufactures advertise
their product to the general public as the
greatest thing since sliced bread, and
subconsiously we beleave the ads. Now we are
sourly disappointed when we find that they lied.
Most all of us owned an A500 or C64 or whatever
and should know better, but we don't.
Now what about all the unsuspecting public that
all these TV ads are directed at, they know
nothing.
They're not going to learn anything, all they'll
get is disappointment. People need to really
pay attention to the ads, you know like 24/7
tech support. Why do they need that if the
software worked as advertised.
I respect and envy Mikey's knowledge.....
If I could just figure out where to even start
on the Damned thing I would probably be OK.
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PPCRulez: You don't have to (nor can) install any drivers.
Oh, those are bad. Lots of the card readers we have at work don't have drivers, or even directions! Just plug it in and it works! Yeah, right. I suppose that's why 5 out of the 6 Unity Digital USB readers we sold were returned to us. I plugged mine into a Win98 box, and it kept asking for a driver.
For that kind of device, though, you'll have to clean out the device manager, and then plug it in AFTER the computer starts. Also, if you get it working, type "diskmgmt.msc" in the Start Menu/Run dialog, make sure a card is in the camera, right-click on the mass storage device, and click Change Drive Letter and Path. Without a dedicated, assigned drive letter, the device may appear and disappear for no reason. Make sure there's a card in the camera when you do this, or Disk Management will throw a tantrum (removable disks tend to do that).
fx: linux structure of files is a mess
I agree. I think it's a bit hypocritical of UN*X people to criticize Microsoft for dumping everything in the System folder. They do the same thing with the "bin" folder. Also, there's so much stuff that just goes in the "etc" folder. If you're suddenly stuck having to edit your congig files by hand (and that will happen), digging through the "etc" can be a real pain, especially from a vanilla console that doesn't use color (unless you know how to turn it on). Everything is case sensitive, too. It took me a while to figure out why "xconfigurator" didn't work, but "XConfigurator" did. God, I hate that.
I know standard I/O and pipes are useful for programming, but this is the 21st century. Why are we still bumming around with Telnet-compatible B&W shells? I miss the old text user-interfaces (TUIs) used in MS-DOS. Navigating interfaces without a mouse ROCKS.
And about the "having to reinstall the OS" problems, this has never happened to me in any OS except Windows, I usually reinstall Linux every now and then because it's grows huge with programs I'm installing and testing, but Windows has actually crashed on me once and showed a message telling me I had to reinstall windows.
Ah, the dreaded registry corruption. I've only seen that happen under Win95, though. Win2K only seems to blow up when I put on new drivers or something goes wrong with WindowsUpdate.
I haven't re-installed my A1200's HD since I ran into a filesystem mishap in 1995. ;-)
Hammer: The reason for that is simple i.e. Windows 9X's VXD drivers doesn’t work with Windows NT5.x style driver modelling.
Simple reason, but inexcusable. Just because Microsoft tidied up the driver installation GUI doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to use Win98 drivers in Win98.
One could have another cut-down installation of WinXP/Win2K to rescue the main boot drive.
What a waste of 1 gig! :-)
No one has forced you to upgrade to Win2K/XP IF Windows 98 does the work for you.
Wait, do you think I'm complaining that Win98 drivers don't work in Win2K? Of course they won't. I mean Win98 drivers won't work in Win98 because IE6 includes a new driver installation system that isn't fully compatible with older drivers (and can't be removed once installed).
I could care less since Win2K is far supirior, but my customers keep returning merchandise because it doesn't work on their computers. When I try it on a Win98 box I have lying around, I find out those products won't work on my machine, either, if I have IE6 installed. Companies shouldn't be forced to update their drivers regularly because Microsoft wants to screw around.
the_leander: I do find that a lot of the problems I've encountered is due to hardware not sticking to the standards, usb stuff especially seems to be bad for this.
I've found it's because of drivers, politics, and idiotic marketing decisions, not the hardware. USB is really good, IMO, it's the Windows USB driver model, and many manufacturers' rediculous hacks, that really suck.
ronybeck: As a result MS Word took 10-15 minutes to open a document because it kept trying to poll the printer server.
Isn't it amazing how long it takes Windows to realize that something isn't actually there? Netscape running on a Mac does the same thing. The Internet connection is down, but it will keep trying to load a webpage for 15 minutes, all the while the "Stop" button is grayed out! Doing graphic design work on the PowerMac was a horrible experience. Everything locked up the system for minutes at a time, before it realized that the device didn't exist!
No major qualms, I just like the concept behind the AmigaOS a lot more.
Most people have no major qualms with Windows, until something goes wrong. Windows is so inconsistent, that one person may have a nightmare on his hand, while other people just sit around in bewilderment, giving helpful advice, like, "I've NEVER had a problem with MY computer!"
Good for you!
I've never used Win2K really, maybe I'm missing out on something here...
A faster, lighter XP without the eye candy, no stupid product activation, and lesser game compatibility. Everything today runs fine under Win2K, so I have no reason to upgrade to XP. Also, I change my hardware a lot, so XP's anti-piracy nagging would get on my nerves.
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melot: All the computer manufactures advertise their product to the general public as the
greatest thing since sliced bread, and
subconsiously we beleave the ads.
Don't all companies do that? A company is nothing without its reputation.
These days, it's not called reputation. It's called "brand awareness".
People need to really
pay attention to the ads, you know like 24/7
tech support. Why do they need that if the
software worked as advertised.
So, if they offered 8/5 tech support, you'd be more interested in their product? :-)
What really needs to happen is people need to get away from the hype and think about what they really need. I use Photoshop all day, so I need a top-flight system. If all I did was browse the web, a celeron would do me fine. My dad's friend, on the other hand, spent $4,000 on a 3+ Ghz P4 with dual 250 Gig hard drives! He doesn't do any business work on his system, so what does he need all that power and storage for?! If he wanted it for a game machine, he could get a better long-term deal by upgrading his machine later, rather than getting an end-all upgrade now for that much cash. I don't get it.
Another hype item: digital cameras. I can't tell you how many people walk into my [ex]-store wanting to buy a digital camera, but they have no clue how much time and money they'll have to invest. GO DIGITAL is the war cry in the photo industry, because it's the way of the future! Apparently, the way of the future involves not being able to print pictures off a memory card, because a Kodak DLS printer can't read JPEG files with certain kinds of meta data. I find it very amusing that digital photos taken with a Kodak camera may not come up on a Kodak DLS minilab, and in some cases, may actually crash the workstaion. I really hated that machine, and I'm glad I'm not working at that store, anymore.
I'd like to say that's a Kodak issue, but apparently, all manufacturers are having these kinds of issues. Instead of making good, solid standards, they just abstract everything with XML, DPOF, KIAS... and then require you to install all the "client" programs to work with thier crappy little applets. Kodak is run by script kiddies, and Fuji, Agfa, Polaroid, Noritsu, and all the others, aren't much better.
I mean, there isn't even a standard way of numbering digital photos as you take them. The customer orders frame #142, and they get DCM00142.JPG, which is not the same thing. Many camera manufacturers haven't even agreed whether movie files should be counted as frame numbers or skipped entirely, making it near impossible to order prints from a memory card if there's movies on it.
The point: This is the information age, but nobody is concerned about the QUALITY of that information. It's just a war over volume, like it has been in the computer industry for 20 years.
I respect and envy Mikey's knowledge.....
If I could just figure out where to even start
on the Damned thing I would probably be OK.
Another think I wish more developers realized, is that while we all have the ability to learn about our computers, there are many things people shouldn't have to learn. What's the point of spending $300 for an operating system, just so you have to spend weeks learning how to use it? Why do people get all pissy at newbies because they don't know, "oh, of course you're having trouble, because you didn't disable *THAT* problematic feature!"
Time is money. If people feel like wasting hours of their life to figure out one little gadget, they should stick to freeware. Commercial developers have an obligation to make software that meets the customer's expectations. If your users can't use your software, that's your own damn fault, not the users.
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Hmmm....Over the 10 or so years I have been using Windows, I have had nothing but constant problems.
At one stage it was so bad, (win98) I was spending an hour fixing the PC each time I needed to use it!
As of two weeks ago I have fixed all Windows problems - permanently. I removed my XP18000 M/B and put an AmigaOne in place of it. Its running Linux quite nicely now.
Some of the previous Windows problems I have had include:
Win95: Icons on desktop are suddenly rearranged in alphabetical order. I could rearrange them - but only until the next time I reboot. The only cure I found was a complete reinstall of Windows. This would last for a few months and then it would happen again. This happened on a number of different computeres.
Win98: Machine would suddenly freeze. It was more likely to do it if I was actually doing nothing with it. I would come back to the PC after an hour or so and 50% of the time the mouse pointer had frozen. Of course, I would be chastised for not shutting down my computer properly when I rebooted. I was never able to locate the source of the problem, as both Linux and WinXP would not exhibit this behaviour on the same hardware.
WinXP: Actually quite stable, but there is a really annoying habit where it boots up, then I have to wait a few minutes before I could launch an application. During this period, the hard drive is not being accessed. I was never able to find out why this was happening. Linux did not exhibit this behaviour.
In all the above cases, these problems were on newly installed computers with only windows installed. No other software to cause conflicts.
Maybe Microsoft is employing Mr Murphy within their organisation.
One amusing incident I remember was when I was with a friend who insisted I was "doing something wrong" as he never, ever, had Windows problems. He went to show me something on his PC, and as he moved his mouse to get rid of his screensaver, it promptly crashed! I had a grin a mile wide when I saw it!
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"It's always the user's fault"?
I think the programers are at fault. Of coure "Ease of Use & SetUp" are a non starter. If you have to jump through hoops to set up the system then, it was poorly programed and designed. Oh crap - I just discribed Winblows!
Problem solved - get a new OS!
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I've used hundred of hours to nurse my (and my friends) Windows machines and it's all wasted time.
Even if some fix works for some time, soon something happens that makes things go wrong again. (like security updates)
On a simple OS like AmigaOS, one can rely that it runs flawlessly for years without maintenance.
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The thing is, you just cant group all Windows owners into that category. Also, most windows users are novices and dont know any and dont what to know anything about computing... They just want it to work. And it should. You should NOT have to endlessly tweek, remove components, edit config scripts, install programs to make windows faster, to get it working at a resonable rate.
If your comparing windows to Amiga. DONT! Windows has more features in its little finger than AmigaOS4 shall. No im not flamming. Im saying that, its a complicated peice of software, and it may not have been written or designed some people want.
also, i've been a windows users. I've tweeked it, edited stuf and its running a lot faster. Its always been stable. But the fact is, i was able to do it because i've been using computers for years. My mother is still afraid of the mouse. Computers should work. You should havnt have to configure a home computer, because thats exactly what its supposed to be... a HOME computer. Made for the HOME!!
Please be more specific in your postings. Not ALL windows users are experts and not all can tweek their system.
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The thing is, you just cant group all Windows owners into that category.
I agree, hence subject line!
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What amazes me most about the anti-windows folks here is they are mostly complaining about Windows 98, which hasn't been a current windows product for Five years now. Upgrade your hardware and software, it's a different world today folks..
Get with the ball game folks, Windows 98 and ME are built-on MS-DOS but windows XP is built on windows NT (and is the next generation of NT).
It has a full multi-tasking kernal with much more memory protection and virtual protection than DOS/Windows ever did..
You can't have a perfect "it just works" with any thing you throw at it ever computer. Same goes for Apple Macintosh OS X etc.
Windows works and intel hardware works, but you have to take a little time to get training and knowledge on how to support your own useage like any system.
Windows considering it has to work with "EVERYTHING" in the world that Microsoft doesn't even make themselves does a good job. Microsoft provides hardware driver certification for every product that Windows works with.
Windows is more complex than an Amiga but it also has a lot more responsibilities, there are things I can't do on an Amiga that I can do on a PC and vice versa..
Also Windows is supported and a heck of a lot more hardware integrated than Linux is, and at least i can walk to a store and buy a piece of software and it runs out of box. I also don't have to compile a device driver to make it work either (or not work as I find more common with Linux, or it's missing some major feature because the info isn't available to the open source community).
Learn your OS or call tech support before complaining and if you "roll your own hardware" do you really expect the same support as a Dell or Gateway could be..
I would also make a comment about XP, yes it takes a while to boot up from a cold boot.. Suspend and resume works great for me and saves where I was.. All modern PCs support that (which is close to instant ON as you can get).
Windows users used to complain about how fast the windows desktop would appear. To answer that criticism Microsoft shows you the desktop, while it still takes a while to load after you see that or can access the desktop. Get over it, or use hibernate/suspend/resume (they work great)..
For users that don't understand the differences between win98/ME and Windows 2000 and XP, 98/ME contains partial 16bit support making things like VXDs (Virtual device drivers) necessary. There is such a performance jump because 2000 and above is completely 32bit..
As for the VXD comment.. Why anyone would wanna throttle down a device driver on NT/2000/XP by requiring it to work with 16-bit code is beyond me (VXDs were used in a lot of older VGA cards crappy drivers).. You have to draw the line and go to a more high performance system at some point and get a real multi-tasking kernal that isn't loaded from DOS and removes the leash being put on performance..
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or use hibernate/suspend/resume (they work great)..
Hibernate is imo a fantastic feature in a OS, all operating systems should have something like that in it.
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A4000Bear wrote:
WinXP: Actually quite stable, but there is a really annoying habit where it boots up, then I have to wait a few minutes before I could launch an application. During this period, the hard drive is not being accessed. I was never able to find out why this was happening. Linux did not exhibit this behaviour.
This behaviour is really strange and has happened on my mothers laptop. Sometimes it just waits a minute or something, doing absolutely nothing (you can move the mouse etc but you can't launch applications). Sometimes it boots and starts without this delay and sometimes this happens.
Also regarding the statements that problems is the users fault is really ignorant statements.
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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".
Further teaking required, cos cars have bit's that need routine maintainance, tyres, brake pads, bulbs, windscreen wipers etc... sorry if this is a)obvious and b)been pointed out by another person. :-D :-) :-P
*edit*
Yes, I'm aware certain things need replacing in the world of IT, printer cartridges are the main culprate, always running out of ink, and um... etc :hammer:
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kolla wrote:
Learning Windows is a waste of time anyways, and neither interresting nor fun.
Ummm...waste of time? Open your eyes and look around you, more than 90% of the world rely on it, whether you like it or not, its a part of life. Microshaft isn't going anywhere for a while, so you might as well take the time to at least understand it.
@all
My current system has XP, my previous system had XP, the missus system has XP and my server is running 2K Server, not one of these computers has ever given me any OS related grief at all, the only example of XP that I had problems with was the beta release I got hold of when it first came out. The reason for this is simple, I, like mikeymike has said numerous times, took the time to configure them all properly. The only time I ever have problems with XP is when I try some crazy overclock, thats it.
Windows is like everything else in life, if you take the time to do it properly, you will be rewarded with reliability and performance.
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I think what it often comes down to is the fact that people feel that, as this is an Amiga site, they have to jump on some bandwagon and slag off windows at every opportunity - almost in order to show some kind of loyalty to the cause.
Just like a bunch of teenage boys :-D
(no offence intended, if any teenage boys are reading)
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Also Windows is supported and a heck of a lot more hardware integrated than Linux is, and at least i can walk to a store and buy a piece of software and it runs out of box.
This is entirely the cause of microsofts monopoly... Hardware manufactors are only developing drivers for microsofts products.. Linux and other OSes has to live with drivers that are made by voluntarily people that only does it as a hobby.. there is a few exceptions though...
I would also make a comment about XP, yes it takes a while to boot up from a cold boot.. Suspend and resume works great for me and saves where I was.. All modern PCs support that (which is close to instant ON as you can get).
My laptop got a bsod when i woke it up from suspend mode in XP.. worked fine on both 2k and even linux! :-D
Ummm...waste of time? Open your eyes and look around you, more than 90% of the world rely on it, whether you like it or not, its a part of life. Microshaft isn't going anywhere for a while, so you might as well take the time to at least understand it.
Why should he/she bother to learn Windows, when some other OS might do the same job better?
There is loads of better OSes around... Take for example BeOS... much smaller, more stable, no reboot needed, boots in less than 10secs and so on...
And why did microsoft with win3.1 be able to get such a big userbase, while os/2 lost its userbase? Win3.1 with its lack of multitasking, 16bit os hosted on dos.. while os/2 was 32bit and much more stable!! amazing... sure was not because of quality of the product.. sigh :-(
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mikeymike, I couldn't agree with you more.
A properly configured and constructed Intel/AMD pc runs windows wonderfully.
My box has been up for 12 days straight with no problems, and it would be longer it it weren't for it's scheduled cleaning and a power outage. Without those it would be close to 6 weeks!
:heart: for Windows, it let's me do what I want to do everyday with no problems. oh, and I like Bill Gates too :-)
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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. :)
what about an oil change? :roll:
how many cars do you buy every year?
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oh, and to those who have complained about Windows in general, you are dillusional.
The problem is YOU. You are either impatient too
learn someting new, or just plain ignorant.
[/thread]
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I agree. I think it's a bit hypocritical of UN*X people to criticize Microsoft for dumping everything in the System folder. They do the same thing with the "bin" folder. If you're suddenly stuck having to edit your congig files by hand (and that will happen), digging through the "etc" can be a real pain, especially from a vanilla console that doesn't use color (unless you know how to turn it on). Everything is case sensitive, too. It took me a while to figure out why "xconfigurator" didn't work, but "XConfigurator" did. God, I hate that.
This should most likely read "I don't understand anything about the linux file structure so therefore I will say it is wrong and broken."
Sure it looks very scary to new users but does have structure to it! For instances, as a general rule
/usr - stuff used by no-admin users.
/etc - system configuration and some system files
/lib - suprisingly you find library files here ( amoung other things )
/bin - commands belonging to the system and accessable to all users
/sbin - commands only accessable to root and the system
/boot - the kernel, ram files and other things needed for booting
Of coarse these break down again into, for example
/usr/bin - user accessable non-system related commands
/usr/lib - librarys needed by the above and other user stuff
/usr/src - source code for various programs.
Compare that with chucking everything into, say a System Folder, and windows looks very average indeed.
I know standard I/O and pipes are useful for programming, but this is the 21st century. Why are we still bumming around with Telnet-compatible B&W shells? I miss the old text user-interfaces (TUIs) used in MS-DOS. Navigating interfaces without a mouse ROCKS.
Yes. Text consoles are there and a very important for remote administration. I can tell that you have never tried to remotly admin a Windows machine over, say, a 64K link. Compare it to administering a unix machine over that same link using telnet or more likely ssh. Sending text is much faster than sending images of what is on the screen. Not useful to home users maybe but essential to Server Admins, where linux is used heavily.
The command line provides other powerful advantages that can not be replicated using a mouse. For lack of a better example, consider having to go through 2389723 Directories and delete a file with aname containing certain string in the file name or of a specify size. This can be done with one command which may only need to be executed once and complete with in a few minutes. Do that with your DOS and mouse :-) This is but one reason for still using them.
Also, there's so much stuff that just goes in the "etc" folder.
*sarcasm*Yes having configuration files located in one easy to find directory is a pain. I think I would prefer to mix it in with the spooler, some exe files, bmp wallpapers in a windows directory. Or perhaps we should make it all one file and call it a registry. Then it ( 1 file ) can become corrupt and require you to install and entire system from scratch!*/sarcasm
If you're suddenly stuck having to edit your congig files by hand (and that will happen), digging through the "etc" can be a real pain, especially from a vanilla console that doesn't use color (unless you know how to turn it on).
All the linux distributions I have used have had a colour termnial windows, not that you need it to read text. In gnome, a more popular desktop, you can change the colour scheme in the Edit menu. It isn't as hard as you make out.
But if for what ever reason you can't read text unless it is in bright fantastic colours, I suggest WindowsXP for its some what vomit inducing colour scheme.
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what about an oil change?
If I factored that into my analogy, a Windows system/car would need an oil change every three friggin' days.
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bhyman1 wrote:
oh, and to those who have complained about Windows in general, you are dillusional.
The problem is YOU. You are either impatient too
learn someting new, or just plain ignorant.
[/thread]
So you mean everyone who dislike it is just plain stupid, just because you like it and have no problems with it?
I have had experience with microsoft products"OSes" since the dos days and all of them sucked compared to alternative OSes i have used through the time..
May i ask what OSes you have tried?
I think it is lame to call everyone who have a different opinion dillusionaled amatours... But oh well... you know better than everyone anyways...
I also find it funny how installing some software might destroy your whole XP install...not being able to boot even in safe mode with everything turned off.. I think that is pretty weak for a modern OS...
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Hey Mikey,
I know this isn't the right place for this, but since we're all here I might as well ask it now... Do you know of any way to have WinXP run some kind of script or batch file at bootup? Is there a startup file of some kind? If I want to have certain commands run at startup (like "delete c:\temp\*.*" at every logon), could I just create a batch file and stuff it into the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ ??? Just curious.
- Mike
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@Glaucus
Easiest way I can think of doing it is by writing a batch file and putting it in the Startup folder. However, you can also assign logon scripts to users in both 2K and XP.
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You could also put the batch file in the Autoexec.bat.
Yes XP has an Autoexec.bat. You just have to unhide the system files to see it.
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Hi,
Just took a course in college on Windows 2000 professional and server. It is funny that the more I know the more windows 2000 crashes.
Has anyone noticed that as the PC clones claim that they are running faster they actually are running slower at least in real time by my stop watch, or is it that the PC clone mfg's are lying to us, stay tuned I will investigate this matter more. My stop watch tells me that my old 500 mhz Compaq Presario takes 2 minutes and 39 seconds to start up. My Amiga 3000 at 25 mhz takes 32.5 seconds to start up, and my new 2.2 ghz e-machine takes 3 minutes and 2 seconds to start up, but now my old Packard Bell at 200 mhz only takes 1 minute and 45 seconds to start up. HMMMM very interesting. Now my Amiga takes approx. 1 sec to shut off, my Packard Bell takes 10 seconds to shut off, my Compaq takes 1 minute and 52 seconds to shut off and my e-machine at 2.2 ghz takes 2 minutes and 56 seconds to shut off. So this tells me that the fastest machine I own is really the slowest, and the slowest machine I own (Amiga) is really the fastest, at least in real time.
Very Interesting!
My Amiga 3000 running OS 2.0 hasn't crashed in 10 years, my Packard Bell running Windows 95 crashes about once every 6 months, my Compaq Presario running Windows 98 crashes about once a year, and my e-machine running Windows XP hasn't crashed yet, (only had it 2 months) :-)
HMMM My oldest machine the Amiga seems to be the most dependable.
HMMM now what am I using Windows 2000 on, how about an 800 mhz Microtel machine, like I said the more I know about a OS the more it crashes, I crash this out at least twice a month.
Smerf
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I hope you are joking.
Or maybe we are wrong to expect a multi-billion dollar operating system with over 90% of the market share, development, engineering, and everything else to outperform an outdated, underfunded, niche system? Gee whiz, what was I thinking?
Do you think we are on here because we are forced to use Amigas? Most of us were smart enough to evaluate multiple systems and run away from the crappy ones.
Unfortunately we still have to fight with Wind*ws every day in order to find some sort of mediocre compliance with the rest of the planet.
Many of us are more adept than the mentioned lemming crowd, and are the ones fixing their "wonderful" systems as a friend, or for our employment.
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Ah...it was too good to stay away from.
Besides, that prat "DoomMaster" is gone (for pete's sake, guys, didn't you realize from post #1 he was a troll?) it's a bit more fun.
But on to the topic at hand!
I tend to agree with the general attitude given regarding Windows 'round here.
Let me see if I can encapsulate my thoughts without doing a line-item on every post...
Firstly, there's so many cries of "Well, I've got windows running on xyz processor. It crashes. It's junk." or "Well, windows was running until I installed 'xyz', then it totally crashed and I had to reformat and reinstall."
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!"
Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ;-) ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.
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.
That doesn't mean buying Crucial RAM (although it helps), but know what kind of gear you're putting together. If you can spend $120 on an AMD CPU, then save your pennies and spend the money on a decent motherboard (Asus and Abit are particularly well-regarded). Don't buy no-name junk with unsigned drivers. Buying a NIC? Skip over that $5 card and spend the extra money on, say, a Netgear or Linksys. One of the worst problems with XP I had was due to a bad NIC driver - buffer overflows would cause the damned system to reboot! Swapped it out, put a $15 Netgear in place of that SunshineRainbowFarEastRicePaper piece of crap card and presto! No more issues.
Secondly...the issue of RAM and HD footprint? I think we can all agree here that despite the "bloat", WindowsXP or 2000 can easily fit on a 5gb HD, right? And run well enough with 128mb of physical RAM, correct?
Now how cheap are those things - even quality components? $15-$20 for the drive (most manufacturers quit making 'em that small so vendors tend to charge a "rarity premium" if you can find 'em - check out www.pricewatch.com to see what I mean; a 5gb HD costs about $10 less than a 30gb!) $10-$20 for the RAM?
I gave away a 433mhz celeron with that HD and RAM combo - and bought XP and installed it for my folks.
Guys, the "issue" of OS size and RAM requirements is nonexistent. RAM and HD space are commodity items. This isn't the days of 5MB fullheight MFM drives anymore. Incidentally, you can install a stripped down XP or 2000 on a 1gb HD...
Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".
I love the Amiga as much as the next person...but the fact of the matter is that it's not 100% code efficiency that gets you the whole OS* on five floppy disks and installs in 10 minutes, and boots in ten seconds.
Firstly, you're looking at a custom "BIOS" and "CMOS" (if we can call Kickstart that) which are tied very closely in with the OS and the native hardware - upon who's initialization add-on non native HW depends.
Secondly...it just doesn't do as much.
(Waits for the din to settle.)
Not "you don't do as much with it", but it in and of itself doesn't do as much. Take 3.1*, out of the box, and tell me how you network it with other systems. Tell me how you set it up to have a static IP or use DHCP. Tell me how USB classes work under it. Or how much support OpenGL has. Or how I can connect an HP2200l printer to it. Or how I lock the workstation when I'm away from the keys. Or what email, web-browsing and media playback tools come with it. Or what NVidia video cards are supported. Or what sound cards. Etc.
Is there a lot going on in Windows? You betcha. And I wouldn't do without it for the world.
Don't get me wrong, guys. There's a lot about Win I don't like. Like the OS trying to "phone home" with trouble reports when something goes awry. Or the "MSN Messenger" client that tries to run on startup. Or the GUI layout. Or the font dithering.
But y'know what? I can take two minutes and turn that stuff off, or show someone else how to do it.
/rant
*Taking this as a baseline for the OS, that is.
PS - someone in the thread mentioned that XP has an "autoexec.bat". Ooooooooh no it does not!
XP has boot.ini, and while it can be seen by unhiding system files PLEASE folks do NOT poke around in there unless you know what you're doing. Boot.ini is a batch file like autoexec.bat ONLY in that it's a batch file. The syntax of boot.ini is cryptic even to me, sometimes. ####ing around with it will only lead to tears unless you know what you're doing! It'd be like deleting your RDB (or having a hardware manufacturer write a driver to do it for you - #### you, Elbox).
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Well said BOOTdisk, and I think I knew XP doesn't have a autoexec.bat, and I have edited the boot.ini in the past when I setup a dual boot for ME & XP.
- Mike
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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.
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What the heck do some of you guys have installed on your systems that makes them take over 30 seconds to boot up? lol
Both of my primary systems (one runs 2000 Pro one runs XP Pro) boot up in 30 seconds or less. Even my notbook which is just a Celeron 1400 boots up Windows 2000 in under 30 seconds. It sounds to me like you have drivers installed over old drivers and every time the OS boots up it has to decide what to use, or you have a card in one of your slots that isn't reporting back correctly to the PlugandPlay handler. Also using defrag once in a while helps (do it from safemode, and delete your swapfile beforehand, that way you get a nice new contiguous swapfile the next time you start windows).
I really do like Amigas, I've owned one since my first 1000. I really do like my new PC's. The new games availabe on them are amazing, the productivity I get out of them is what keeps my mortgage paid and my car filled with gas. I couldn't survive without Photoshop and Dreamweaver Ultradev. Sure, every OS has it's issues. If you want my honest opinion, the newest Macs are the best commercially available system out there, except they suffer from the same fate Amigas did - GM thinking. "Well my dad owned a GM, so that must be the best thing I should own!" translates into "Well my competitor uses PCs so that must be the platform I should use!" This turns into lower volume sales, and even lower software availability ($ drives the computer market, not bravado and emotion).
Windows XP is an awesome OS, windows 2000 is another awesome OS (my 2K server has been on for 172 days), my Linux server has been on for 421 days but is it better because of that? Nope! It's just there because it performs 2 functions I can't get on my Win2K box, and the Win2K box does 20 things I can't do on my linux box. It's all about what you *need* to do with your computer that drives what OS you should be using, my Amiga stuff is all about some latent emotions that keep me driven to support and use it (just being honest). If I could buy a new Amiga that was 2GHz, still had the custom chips (updated to today's graphic and sound specs) and there were a couple hundred software companies releasing new swag for it I'd be all over one. But there isn't, and that's why I use pc's and WIndows for anything productive.
But then I'm some sort of crazy realist. :-D
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I tried to use BeOS. But there wasn't enough software for desktop stuff like GOOD movie players or word processors. I use linux now with Ximian and it leaves BeOS for dead in the desktop areana.
Movie players... VLC (videolanclient, also available for linux, windows, mac, *bsd and qnx), can run a hell of a lot more formats then the built in media player, and uses a lot less resources to do so. Zeta will have mPlayer if its any consolation.
Gobe productive is a damned fine word processor that can read just about everything going. But failing that Zeta includes a word processor called Zedit, and theres also a port of Abiword for BeOS should neither of them take your fancy. Just how many WP's do you need???
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B00tDisk wrote:
Firstly, there's so many cries of "Well, I've got windows running on xyz processor. It crashes. It's junk." or "Well, windows was running until I installed 'xyz', then it totally crashed and I had to reformat and reinstall."
My keyboard died and I had to do a hardware reset.. and Boom.. Windows2k didn't boot anymore. A good OS shouldn't be able to be destroyed that easily.
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!"
The analogy with the car and my experience above would be something like a got a flat tire had to turn of the engine. When I changed tyre and tried to start the car it just didn't start anymore :)
That doesn't mean buying Crucial RAM (although it helps), but know what kind of gear you're putting together. If you can spend $120 on an AMD CPU, then save your pennies and spend the money on a decent motherboard (Asus and Abit are particularly well-regarded). Don't buy no-name junk with unsigned drivers. Buying a NIC? Skip over that $5 card and spend the extra money on, say, a Netgear or Linksys. One of the worst problems with XP I had was due to a bad NIC driver - buffer overflows would cause the damned system to reboot! Swapped it out, put a $15 Netgear in place of that SunshineRainbowFarEastRicePaper piece of crap card and presto! No more issues.
True some hardware is flaky, and really cheap stuff should be avoided. But sometimes good brand name hardware isn't much better anyway. And when Linux can run stable on the same hardware that Win2k can't run stable on.. then it can't be a hardware fault.
Actually I don't find win2k particularly unstable.. it's quite stable and I'm pretty satisfied with it. But the times that it do crash I'm afraid that it will not start again. Something that I don't have to worry about with Linux or AmigaOS.
Secondly...the issue of RAM and HD footprint? I think we can all agree here that despite the "bloat", WindowsXP or 2000 can easily fit on a 5gb HD, right? And run well enough with 128mb of physical RAM, correct?
Yes, but with 128MB you better have a fast harddrive. And still 64-128MB for just running the OS is bloat in my book, but Linux is quite bloated also when you want to use a decent gui. Doesn't matter that RAM and HD's are cheap.. an OS shouldn't require that amount of RAM. The OS can't be very well optimized when it uses that kind of memory footprint.
Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".
Guys, the "issue" of OS size and RAM requirements is nonexistent. RAM and HD space are commodity items. This isn't the days of 5MB fullheight MFM drives anymore. Incidentally, you can install a stripped down XP or 2000 on a 1gb HD...
And that is exactly the kind of attitude among programmers that leads to bloat and unoptimized software. RAM and HD is cheap so who cares if it's optimized. Just let people buy more RAM and better CPU's.
Not "you don't do as much with it", but it in and of itself doesn't do as much. Take 3.1*, out of the box, and tell me how you network it with other systems. Tell me how you set it up to have a static IP or use DHCP. Tell me how USB classes work under it.
Still I can have AmigaOS with MiamiDx, Poseidon (for USB), Turboprint, Apache Web-server all running at startup and still it takes less than 15 seconds to boot. AmigaOS is really efficent and so are all it's programs. Which gives even greater speeds when run on something like a MorphOS/AOS v4 box with a G3@600Mhz
But with Win2k it takes ages to boot. WinXP is alot faster at boot, although it's nowhere near the AmigaOS boot times.
And with AmigaOS just press the power button when you want to turn off the computer. No ridiculous shutdown stuff.
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DonnyEMU said-
Get with the ball game folks, Windows 98 and ME are built-on MS-DOS but windows XP is built on windows NT (and is the next generation of NT). It has a full multi-tasking kernal with much more memory protection and virtual protection than DOS/Windows ever did..
From I hate MS (http://www.euronet.nl/users/frank/IhateMS.html)
"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!" 98/ME contains partial 16bit support making things like VXDs (Virtual device drivers) necessary. There is such a performance jump because 2000 and above is completely 32bit.
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."
To sum up- "An internal memo amoung Microsoft developers mentioned 63,000 (yes: sixty-three thousand) known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. "
If Your House had a roof made by Microsoft - you'd be advised to don raincoats (or hold-up umbrellas) if it started raining OUTSIDE! :-P
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bhyman1 ADVISED-
oh, and to those who have complained about Windows in general, you are dillusional. The problem is YOU. You are either impatient too learn someting new, or just plain ignorant.
GEE - Are YOU campaigning to be voted Chief Astroturfer?
or . . . did you arrive from a alternate Earth where their MS actually produces quality software? ;-)
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The OS can't be very well optimized when it uses that kind of memory footprint.
Fact is, the memory footprint is not an indicator of optimization. System caches for example can use up tons of ram quite easily. And like others have mentioned, Windows provides far more services then does AmigaOS right out of the box. If you are hell bent on running an OS on 64MB then you can simply disable every service on XP, and you'll get a system similar to AmigaOS in functionality.
The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.
- Mike
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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!
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The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.
I don't agree with AOS needing more builtin services. I prefer to have a choice of for example network stack. Look at how much better the Amiga TCP/IP stacks are just because you have a choice. It would be accepteble to trade of memory usage for speed. But speed isn't particular good in Windows and it has a large memory footprint. In fact Windows has speed issues. Sometimes you can click on something and it just takes a while before something happens. Multitasking isn't exactly Windows strongest point. ANd we shouldn't even mention the horrible Virtual Memory implementation.
And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.
I find the memory usage of Windows unaccepeble even when running a bare minimum system.
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Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.
This can often be the case yeah... But still it cant explain all problems.. I mean if it was just the hardwares fault, then home come it works perfectly on some other OS?
And you cant dismiss the fact that every user have a diffrent perception on what is stable/fast and so on.
I have heard many people saying how they can have their windows puter up for a whole week! Which i personally think is lousy! A decent os after my opinion should not need to be rebooted or crash in months of time. Take for example my dads pc running linux... It is at somewhere between 75-80 days now, and its being used every day... with winXP the exact same puter either crashed or had to be rebooted usually before a full week.. And yeah... was using ONLY microsoft certified drivers!
And btw why do you have to reboot windows still? Installing gfx drivers, soundcard drivers nearly allways leads to a forced reboot.. even in some cases installing a damn program... i really expect more from a modern OS.
I am not saying linux is even near perfect though, it has its flaws also... i think thought that beos was pretty damn near perfect, would have been an awesome OS if there had been more games/software and hw drivers.
And i again say... every OS has a flaw of some sort but some have more than others...
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Tomas wrote:
Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.
This can often be the case yeah... But still it cant explain all problems.. I mean if it was just the hardwares fault, then home come it works perfectly on some other OS?
That Linux puts up with more hardware weirdness is no secret; by that same token, ever try to squeeze all of the features out of, say, a given graphics card with Linux?
And speaking of "other" Amiga OS's and hardware, have you looked at how tight the specs on RAM are for the forthcoming AOS4?
And you cant dismiss the fact that every user have a diffrent perception on what is stable/fast and so on.
Yet many "alternative" OS users seem to think that statement is a single edged sword.
I have heard many people saying how they can have their windows puter up for a whole week!
Not me.
Months, for my Win2k server. I turn off my XP desktops just so the den won't be so damned hot every morning!
And btw why do you have to reboot windows still? Installing gfx drivers, soundcard drivers nearly allways leads to a forced reboot.. even in some cases installing a damn program... i really expect more from a modern OS.
I don't. I installed a dialup modem recently (RIP cable access! sobbing!) and as soon as XP powered on, it identified the "generic 56k softmodem" and that was that, period. I had to install a driver for my wife's system, but no problem there. XP comes with a fairly robust set of drivers for stuff. As to reboots, the only thing that springs to mind that I've had to reboot for are Detonator updates (nVidia drivers - their driver install program won't "complete" without a reboot; ask them, not MS) and the aforementioned NIC - although an IPCONFIG /RENEW probably would've done what the reboot wanted to do (but reregistering the MAC address probably needed the reboot; I was so keen to see the system up and working I didn't do a postmortem on the whole issue).
I am not saying linux is even near perfect though, it has its flaws also... i think thought that beos was pretty damn near perfect, would have been an awesome OS if there had been more games/software and hw drivers.
And i again say... every OS has a flaw of some sort but some have more than others...
Yep. Like how one bad program can kill any revision the the Amiga's OS, for example. Catch it at the wrong time, and it's goodbye bootblock!
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B00tDisk,
I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked. It reminds me quite a bit of an Amiga at times. It actually is plug and play only 10 years after the fact! :)
It does the exact same thing for 99% of pc hardware out there (including printers on your parallel port for gosh sake).
AND if, heaven forbid, you install some new card and the drivers you installed manually for it causes your XP machine to puke, you just RESTORE your XP configuration to the last working restore point and voilla, working machine again! (Most people don't seem to know XP does that, there's no reason to have to reformat an XP runnin machine just because of new (or old) hardware problems or bad drivers).
But don't even get me started on how much I've bitched about 95/98/ME(gasp) being crash-happy POSes... :-D
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Jagabot wrote:
B00tDisk,
I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked. It reminds me quite a bit of an Amiga at times. It actually is plug and play only 10 years after the fact! :)
Heh, yeah. USB is great. Firewire is good too, but in general it's marketshare isn't up to USB's. 'sides, USB2.0 gives firewire a run for it's money...
It does the exact same thing for 99% of pc hardware out there (including printers on your parallel port for gosh sake).
Yep. The aforementioned Celeron433 I put together for my folks I just plugged the printer in to (paralell) and bang, XP said "Aha. HP Deskjet 720. Right, then. Test page? No? Okay." All of about three painless seconds.
AND if, heaven forbid, you install some new card and the drivers you installed manually for it causes your XP machine to puke, you just RESTORE your XP configuration to the last working restore point and voilla, working machine again! (Most people don't seem to know XP does that, there's no reason to have to reformat an XP runnin machine just because of new (or old) hardware problems or bad drivers).
And it's not even that severe; driver rollback is your friend!
But don't even get me started on how much I've bitched about 95/98/ME(gasp) being crash-happy POSes... :-D
XP/2000 were the first MS operating systems I actually "championed". If NT5 nee "2000" had come out in, say 1997, the computing world would be a far better place.
Bring me the heads of the "engineers" who "designed" Win98, 98SE* and WinME!
*SE actually fixed a lot of the things '98 broke, but it's still Windows98 for chrissake.
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I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked.
If the device has support for it in the linux kernel, the usb device will actually be fully working as soon as you plug it in... no questions asked :-P
But still why most usb devices causes trouble on other oses is because of lack of drivers, which again is microsofts monopolys fault.. no hardware manufactors makes drivers for other oses... All the drivers on linux, beos and such is made by hobby programmers who do it for free..... You CANNOT blame lack of drivers on the OS
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Months, for my Win2k server. I turn off my XP desktops just so the den won't be so damned hot every morning!
There is a big difference on a server and a workstation.. The computer is much more vurnable to unstability when you sit on it and play games, surf the web and so on.. My dads linux pc is infact used daily with games, surfing web, chatting, mp3/video and so on.. And btw.. my debian linux server did somewhere between 260-270 days until lighting hit the electrical system, which killed of one tv, hub, monitor and one pc... luckily the server survived with just a reboot
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@Tomas
You're absolutely right, quite a lot of stuff works instantly on my linux box (RedHat) as well, but it's again the same sort of problem the Amiga had. Everyone doing "business" used PC's, so that's where the lions share of developers went. Everyone uses Windows (or so everyone in big business thinks) so that's where the large corporate money goes... and that's where the drivers get written for.
I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but...
If Commodore management had any brains at the time, they would have been selling Amiga 1000's for $3,500 to dealers with a suggested retail of $4,995.00 and touting it as the most powerful business computer on the planet. IT WAS. Instead they brought it to all the big PC dealers and said, look how much stuff this thing does compared to your PC!! The dealers all said "Holy crap that is amazing, how much can I sell it for?! Ten grand !?!" Commodore said "A mere $1500 and they only cost you $1300" To which all the dealers said, "Let me get this straight, I make $1,000 selling a $3,000 8Mhz 8086 PC, and you want me to steer my business customers to this machine that I get a whopping $200 from? It's cool, but not THAT cool... let me show you to the door."
And that is the history of Commodore in a single paragraph. It had nothing to do with users, nothing to do with software availability, nothing to do with software piracy, it was entirely due to Commodore's retarded pricing policies and the inability of the average PC/Apple dealer to make a significant margin on Commodore products so they'd steer customers towards them. Only the true Amiga lovers who were retailing them did that, and look where they are today...
If dealers had been able to make a larger margin selling Amigas, they would have shoved them down the throats of corporate America and you'd have seen WordPerfect for Amiga in every office right beside Lotus 1-2-3 for Amiga (they both existed at the time you know). But nope, no margins meant no Amigas being sold which meant no software being developed for businesses thereafter.
Woah, I went on there for a while didn't I? ;-)
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And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.
Yes and no. Often caches compensate for a sub-systems latency. The CPU's instruction/data cache for example. Sure we could build computers with memory as fast as registers (other architectural issues aside), but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars per PC. So for reasons of cost we decide to make cheaper memory so that we can have more of it, and to get around it's slow access time we use some cache, which isn't as fast as a register but way better then main memory. Same goes with hard drive access. There's lots of sub systems that benefit from a cache simply because optimizing for both speed and memory (if at all possible) often means you take a huge hit in cost.
And btw, you can replace the standard WindowsXP services, but rarely does one really need to. And yes, AOS does need more built in services, that is after all what an OS is for. I mean, it really wasn't that long ago before even the GUI was an optional "service", we've just taken it for granted. Someone who's first computer was an Amiga would expect an OS to provide them with multitasking, a file system, a GUI with windows, buttons, menus and icons, audio support, etc. However things have changed and today's users demand more things, like memory protection, virtual memory, built-in TCP support with DHCP, firewall and other advanced features, built-in OpenGL (or other similar system), built-in media player with plug-in support for more codecs, etc. Expectations have gone up and it's up to the current Amiga care takers to meet those expectations.
- Mike
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Hi,
Just wanted to clarify a few things I said in my past statement.
It just seems as computers get faster and do more micro sloth builds bigger OS's that just eat up all the head room that the new machines give, actually making them slower by our standards of clocking a device called a stop watch or real time (minutes & seconds or in some cases hours).
Lets look at some facts Mandrake Linux loads up on my 500 mhz compaq in just over 15 minutes, Lindows loads up in just over 7 minutes, Windows 2000 in just over 45 minutes.
Mandrake linux gives me an OS and lots of applications like internet programs, an office suite (like micro slot office) and some games. (over 15 minutes install)
Lindows gives me an operating system and internet browser and 4 games (wonder where they got that idea from) (just over 7 minutes install)
Windows 2000 an OS and internet browser with 4 games.
(over 45 minutes install)
Mandrake and Lindows no crashy yet, Windows 2000 crashy at least once a month)
Now lets look at Windows 2000 startup, I turn on computer, i get windows 2000 screen --------------- and still look at windows 2000 screen ------------ then it gives me the OS screen but don't try to use any apps yet it is loading other thingys like volume control, anti virus, this and that, now after about 3 minutes I can use it.
Now lets look at Mandrake, i turn it on, I look at start up choose my OS system, look at hardware found screens, look at software start up screens (drivers) and then after 3 minutes can use system, pretty even start up and shut down with windows 2000
Lindows starts up nice after about 30 secs in OS screen with icons, thing I don't like is that Lindows made screen look like windows screen and operate like windows, but does not run windows programs.
So for speed don't look at 2.2 ghz, or 400 mhz buss speed ask the retailer how long does it take to actually do work.
Is it faster than my machine now in real time.
If you don't like that than ask yourself, self how fast can I type, can I out type a 2.2 ghz machine.
Will that 2.2 ghz speed out distance my printer?
or am I just going to play games.
smerf
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Well, I never found out why XP took forever to boot, however, there was nothing else installed on the machine - just XP. I even formatted and reinstalled three times in an attempt to clear the problem. It never went away. The PC, by the way was an Athlon XP1800. No unusual hardware, just the usual things like a Radeon 7000 video card, 512MB RAM etc...
Having said that, XP was quite reliable - almost as good as my A4000T which (seriously) very rarely crashes (It has crashed once in the last month of heavy usage)
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Glaucus wrote:
Yes and no. Often caches compensate for a sub-systems latency. The CPU's instruction/data cache for example. Sure we could build computers with memory as fast as registers (other architectural issues aside), but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars per PC. So for reasons of cost we decide to make cheaper memory so that we can have more of it, and to get around it's slow access time we use some cache, which isn't as fast as a register but way better then main memory. Same goes with hard drive access. There's lots of sub systems that benefit from a cache simply because optimizing for both speed and memory (if at all possible) often means you take a huge hit in cost.
Yes, but that is a bit different. Now we are talking about hardware caches. With extremly fast small memory. Harddrive cahces in memory can also increase speed of the harddrive.
But talking about system caches is another thing. Windows seems to cacge all kinds of wierd stuff like GUI elements and stuff. Try freeing up memory (with some tool that allows this) and you'll see Windows reduced to a crawl for a while until it has cached GUI elements again. This is bad... using memory for caching GUI shouldn't be necessary if it were optimized.
And btw, you can replace the standard WindowsXP services, but rarely does one really need to. And yes, AOS does need more built in services, that is after all what an OS is for. I mean, it really wasn't that long ago before even the GUI was an optional "service", we've just taken it for granted. Someone who's first computer was an Amiga would expect an OS to provide them with multitasking, a file system, a GUI with windows, buttons, menus and icons, audio support, etc. However things have changed and today's users demand more things, like memory protection, virtual memory, built-in TCP support with DHCP, firewall and other advanced features, built-in OpenGL (or other similar system), built-in media player with plug-in support for more codecs, etc. Expectations have gone up and it's up to the current Amiga care takers to meet those expectations.
Depends on what you mean with built in services. I agree that the OS should include the things you stated above. But they should be optional during install,a nd not just thrown in when you install the OS.
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Well, I never found out why XP took forever to boot, however, there was nothing else installed on the machine - just XP.
Define "forever"? I have an old Athlon XP 1800+ with an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe**** mobo and 512MB PC2700 for reference. Boot time from BIOS is about 31 seconds for WinXP-SP1/IE6-SP1.
****nForce II with SPP/MCP-T, BIOS 1007 for 400FSB support.
Other reference/test boxes;
+ Athlon XP 2800**+, Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2 (nForce II 400 Ultra), 1GB PC3200, CL Audigy 2 ZS. **Multiplier unlocked i.e. 500Mhz(100x5X) to 2200Mhz (200x11X).
+ Athlon XP 1800+, MSI-6330 V3.6 (and MSI-6330 V5)(VIA KT133A), 512MB PC133, CL SBLive 5.1 DE.
And several Pentium II classes…
Please include the brand (or make) who made your motherboard and the chipset in any Windows OS issues.
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vortexau wrote:
From I hate MS (http://www.euronet.nl/users/frank/IhateMS.html)
"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!" 98/ME contains partial 16bit support making things like VXDs (Virtual device drivers) necessary. There is such a performance jump because 2000 and above is completely 32bit.
Define this "executables".
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."
Such statement would be very stupid in the light of MS Windows XP AMD64 and AMD K8 architecture i.e. in AMD64 mode, 16bit modes is virtually non-existent.
One should remember the Pentium Pro's relatively poor performance with X86-16 code (e.g. MS-DOS/Windows 9x). To solve the problem one should install Windows NT 4.0 this is due to it's 32bit'ness.
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Ummm...waste of time? Open your eyes and look around you, more than 90% of the world rely on it, whether you like it or not, its a part of life. Microshaft isn't going anywhere for a while, so you might as well take the time to at least understand it.
Exactly - 90% of the world relies on it - suckers.
If 90% of the world ends up having problems due to windows, I'm just glad I can say I dont know jack about it. I rather flip burgers than waste my time cleaning up after windows disasters.There are just too many windows "knowers" so why compete with them? I have no need of knowing windows, I dont use it myself, we dont use it at work, and everyone I know that does use it seems to struggle with all kinds of problems these days - why should I involve myself in all that crap? :-D
Much better to learn something slightly more sofisticated that can be interresting and fun as well.
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Well well 2k is the most stable OS ms ever made ..and probally will be . XPs memory handling is a nightmare 9x/ME? dont get me started.
I usually say to ppl installing after all the updates to
install XP/2k lite and ripp out WMP/IE/MS java and some other usless crap cluttering the system , and geting a register tool,install the Org Java (by sun) . and sadly the win structure makes to VERY hard to dunderstand what the hell its doing i mean i can figure out alot but im only human after all and like
any other logical human i prefere an Amiga :-D
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Hammer said
Hammer wrote:
vortexau wrote:
Read I hate MS (http://www.euronet.nl/users/frank/IhateMS.html)
One should remember the Pentium Pro's relatively poor performance with X86-16 code (e.g. MS-DOS/Windows 9x). To solve the problem one should install Windows NT 4.0 this is due to it's 32bit'ness.
I seem to recall a product called- Windows for Workgroups!? Do not MS produce EACH successive version of their Operating Systems in a manner similar to a house painter? Who, each 2-3 years, paints it over in a NEW colour? and, if he does it enough times, the house gets physically larger (even by a paint-application layer) each time - while the underlying structure could just be rotting away?
I have NEVER bought (or built) a Microsoft system! I have issues with the LACK of integrity of the company - as would I not (knowingly) buy products marketed by mafia or triads!
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I seem to recall a product called- Windows for Workgroups!? Do not MS produce EACH successive version of their Operating Systems in a manner similar to a house painter?
MS Windows 3.11 for Workgroups is DOS/Win16 OS (minus Win32s add-on) designed for networks and workgroups, which is useless for non-workgroup setups. MS Windows 3.1 only has very basic networking capabilities. This is called product differentiation. Even commercial Linux distro (e.g. Red Hat) uses this product line concept.
With MS Windows 9X; 32bit calls would be serialised into 16bit calls, while Windows NT doesn’t have this translation overhead (the term for that is “thunking” IF I recall correctly).
In modern terms;
+ MS Windows XP Home Edition (NT.5.1) i.e. for home use; has basic networking capabilities. Single processor support.
+ MS Windows XP Pro Edition (NT5.1) i.e. for business workstations, networked home/small office PC setups, dual processor support and offers basic server functions (e.g. IIS, FTP, SMTP services, print-server, file-server, limited Windows terminal server, and ‘etc’).
+ MS Windows 2003 Server X86-32 (NT5.2) i.e. for server use, +2 processor support, 36bit page addressing, extensive server functions (e.g. Streaming server, Terminal server, dotNET server, FTP, IIS with management tools, NTmail server, domain controllers and ‘etc’). Comes in several sub-editions.
Who, each 2-3 years, paints it over in a NEW colour? and, if he does it enough times, the house gets physically larger (even by a paint-application layer) each time - while the underlying structure could just be rotting away?
Not quite, refer to the Pentium Pro’s weakness and workarounds in relation to Windows NT. This issue somewhat related to the major cropping of X86-16 in AMD64 modes.
MS Windows NT/2K/XP’s kernel is related more to VMS than Windows 9x’s kernel. Linux X86 with WINE/WINEX is not quite an original concept since Windows NT and OS/2 Warp already travelled through this path.
I have NEVER bought (or built) a Microsoft system!
That figures...
I have issues with the LACK of integrity of the company - as would I not (knowingly) buy products marketed by mafia or triads!
Note that IBM was guilty of anti-competitive practises(not until ~1996) just like MS.
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, and now a lot of Win98 drivers don't work anymore, saying that the drivers are not designed for your hardware.
There are two sets of driver models in Win98 i.e. VXD and WDM. IF it's VXDs then this driver model is dead in Windows 2K/XP/2K3.
The reason for the change from VXD to Win32 Driver Model Drivers...
"A Win32 Driver Model (WDM) driver can run under Windows 98 and future versions of Windows NT. WDM uses a layered architecture in which each layer isolates portions of the services required of a device driver. This design also allows hardware vendors to contain all hardware-specific functionality in a single file. Before WDM, device drivers had to include hooks for a particular operating system in addition to the elements necessary to interact with a specific piece of hardware. This nonlayered approach prevented device drivers from being supported across multiple operating systems". - Chapter 28 - Windows 98 Architecture.
"Minidrivers
Minidrivers were implemented under Windows 95 in the classes of small computer system interface (SCSI) and network adapters. With Windows 98, the concept of minidrivers has been widened to include support for USB, the IEEE 1394 bus, digital audio, DVD players, still imaging, and video capture. Minidrivers either communicate directly with hardware or form the "glue" between two class drivers.
Hardware minidrivers have the following attributes:
They are source-compatible and binary-compatible across platforms, allowing the minidriver to be used in Windows 98 as well as Windows NT.
They are dynamically loaded and unloaded.
They contain only hardware-specific functionality.
They can expose multiple class interfaces. This functionality is very important in respect to multifunction (or composite) cards. Audio and video hardware are typical examples of multifunction devices.
Minidrivers that connect class drivers have the following attributes:
They are source-compatible and binary-compatible across platforms, allowing the minidriver to be used in Windows 98 as well as future versions of Windows NT.
They are dynamically loaded and unloaded.
They indirectly control hardware through a specific bus class driver.
An example of a "bridging" minidriver is Hidusb.sys. This Human Interface Device (HID) class minidriver translates HID I/O into request packets that are understood by the USB class driver (Usbd.sys). " - Chapter 28 - Windows 98 Architecture.
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MS Windows 3.11 for Workgroups is DOS/Win16 OS (minus Win32s add-on) designed for networks and workgroups, which is useless for non-workgroup setups.
Win3.11 worked just fine without being on a network. It was the first version of MS Windows I used, and for what it was worth it worked okay. Not great, just okay.
Or are you saying the networking add-ons were useless for a non-workgroup setup (which kinda goes without saying)?
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Win3.11 worked just fine without being on a network. It was the first version of MS Windows I used, and for what it was worth it worked okay. Not great, just okay.
My first Windows I use was MS Windows 3.0 (not including OS/2 which was bundled with IBM PS/2 Model 56). I then went through to Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and ‘etc’.
Or are you saying the networking add-ons were useless for a non-workgroup setup (which kinda goes without saying)?
It’s quite useless due to the dominance of Novell at that time.
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Hammer wrote:
Or are you saying the networking add-ons were useless for a non-workgroup setup (which kinda goes without saying)?
It’s quite useless due to the dominance of Novell at that time.
Ah. That makes sense.
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Win3.11 worked just fine without being on a network. It was the first version of MS Windows I used, and for what it was worth it worked okay. Not great, just okay.
Yes, and back then AmigaOS was also a viable option, and in all fairness, Amiga royally stomped Windows3.11's ass! :-D
- Mike
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Hammer,
The slow XP boot was on my old PC - an Asus A7V266 m/b with an Athlon XP1800 CPU. Windows was XP professional, SP1. No unusual hardware in the PC, no other software of any description installed. Settings were default (it was exhibiting the problem on first boot after installation)
Windows would come up in about 30 secs, however, if I tried to launch anything - or even shut it down immediately, I had to wait about 3-5 minutes before anything happened. During the wait, there was no hard drive access. After the wait period expired, there was some hard drive activity, then the selected application would launch. Subsequent attempts to launch applications would be normal, with no wait period.
Now that I have a USB flashcard reader on my A4000, I no longer have a need for Windows, and I have since broken that PC up for parts. The only operable PC I now have is a Bridgeboard in my A4000, which is used only for burning EPROMS.
Maybe I have some sort of "aura" when it comes to PCs - I just have to look at one and it will crash!