A common attitude with Windows users here

[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.

Another eg. of course is use a different OS :-)

Willing to whinge, unwilling to learn.  That's what I think it comes down to.

[mikeymike]

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".

[mikeymike]

@ 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.

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

@ 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.

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

If the car was obviously badly designed, I would be justified in this view, don't you think?

All operating systems have noticeable flaws.

[mikeymike]

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!

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

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.

[mikeymike]

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!

[mikeymike]

The thing is, you just cant group all Windows owners into that category.

I agree, hence subject line!

[mikeymike]

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.