Windows XP delivers another disappointment

[Daedalus]

I don't have a My Computer on my Desktop, but I do have a df0: on my Workbench. Is this optional? I never bothered to do anything about it, so never looked.

Yes it is (in the 3.9 prefs anyway...)

I think on my Amiga's, I couldn't even get windows to come to front without third party software.

ClickToFront has been a commodity supplied with Workbench since 3.0 (maybe before?) which does that. My personal preference is to double-click a window to the front. It does annoy me in Windows to have windows popping forward with a single-click, but hey :-) As so many people have said, you have to put up with it if you want a job.

[Daedalus]

I also read stories by medical technicians at a Toronto hospital. They switched some medical computers from proprietory system to Windows. The technician wrote that compared to their old systems, the Windows ones are much slower nd unstable and they crash occasionally.

I can absolutely confirm this. I'm a service engineer for a company making automated blood testing equipment, and their latest machine was supposed to be faster, cheaper, more reliable, more compatible, more user-friendly etc. than the 15-year-old design with DOS-based software. It runs on Windows 2000, and about 40% of the problems we have are Windows-related, be it print queues, communication issues, timing problems and so on. Andthis is nearly 4 years since the first batch were released for sale. The DOS-based machines, running on 486s are more stable, faster to process results, faster to print, easier to navigate and generally nicer to work with.