A common attitude with Windows users here

[Jagabot]

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

[Jagabot]

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

[Jagabot]

@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? ;-)