Ah...it was too good to stay away from.
Besides, that prat "DoomMaster" is gone (for pete's sake, guys, didn't you realize from post #1 he was a troll?) it's a bit more fun.
But on to the topic at hand!
I tend to agree with the general attitude given regarding Windows 'round here.
Let me see if I can encapsulate my thoughts without doing a line-item on every post...
Firstly, there's so many cries of "Well, I've got windows running on xyz processor. It crashes. It's junk." or "Well, windows was running until I installed 'xyz', then it totally crashed and I had to reformat and reinstall."
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!"
Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ;-) ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.
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.
That doesn't mean buying Crucial RAM (although it helps), but know what kind of gear you're putting together. If you can spend $120 on an AMD CPU, then save your pennies and spend the money on a decent motherboard (Asus and Abit are particularly well-regarded). Don't buy no-name junk with unsigned drivers. Buying a NIC? Skip over that $5 card and spend the extra money on, say, a Netgear or Linksys. One of the worst problems with XP I had was due to a bad NIC driver - buffer overflows would cause the damned system to reboot! Swapped it out, put a $15 Netgear in place of that SunshineRainbowFarEastRicePaper piece of crap card and presto! No more issues.
Secondly...the issue of RAM and HD footprint? I think we can all agree here that despite the "bloat", WindowsXP or 2000 can easily fit on a 5gb HD, right? And run well enough with 128mb of physical RAM, correct?
Now how cheap are those things - even quality components? $15-$20 for the drive (most manufacturers quit making 'em that small so vendors tend to charge a "rarity premium" if you can find 'em - check out
www.pricewatch.com to see what I mean; a 5gb HD costs about $10 less than a 30gb!) $10-$20 for the RAM?
I
gave away a 433mhz celeron with that HD and RAM combo - and bought XP and installed it for my folks.
Guys, the "issue" of OS size and RAM requirements is nonexistent. RAM and HD space are commodity items. This isn't the days of 5MB fullheight MFM drives anymore. Incidentally, you
can install a stripped down XP or 2000 on a 1gb HD...
Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".
I love the Amiga as much as the next person...but the fact of the matter is that it's not 100% code efficiency that gets you the whole OS* on five floppy disks and installs in 10 minutes, and boots in ten seconds.
Firstly, you're looking at a custom "BIOS" and "CMOS" (if we can call Kickstart that) which are tied
very closely in with the OS and the native hardware - upon who's initialization add-on non native HW depends.
Secondly...it just doesn't
do as much.
(Waits for the din to settle.)
Not "you don't do as much with it", but it in and of itself doesn't do as much. Take 3.1*, out of the box, and tell me how you network it with other systems. Tell me how you set it up to have a static IP or use DHCP. Tell me how USB classes work under it. Or how much support OpenGL has. Or how I can connect an HP2200l printer to it. Or how I lock the workstation when I'm away from the keys. Or what email, web-browsing and media playback tools come with it. Or what NVidia video cards are supported. Or what sound cards. Etc.
Is there a lot going on in Windows? You betcha. And I wouldn't do without it for the world.
Don't get me wrong, guys. There's a lot about Win I
don't like. Like the OS trying to "phone home" with trouble reports when something goes awry. Or the "MSN Messenger" client that tries to run on startup. Or the GUI layout. Or the font dithering.
But y'know what? I can take two minutes and turn that stuff off, or show someone else how to do it.
/rant
*Taking this as a baseline for the OS, that is.
PS - someone in the thread mentioned that XP has an "autoexec.bat". Ooooooooh no it does
not!
XP has
boot.ini, and while it can be seen by unhiding system files PLEASE folks do NOT poke around in there unless you know what you're doing. Boot.ini is a batch file like autoexec.bat ONLY in that it's a batch file. The syntax of boot.ini is cryptic even to me, sometimes. ####ing around with it will only lead to tears unless you know what you're doing! It'd be like deleting your RDB (or having a hardware manufacturer write a driver to do it for you - #### you, Elbox).
