A common attitude with Windows users here

[that_punk_guy]

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

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

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

[that_punk_guy]

mikeymike wrote:

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

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

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