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!
