A common attitude with Windows users here

[PPCRulez]

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.

And DLL/registry hell is not very user-friendly.

When something goes wrong with Windows you have no choice but to reinstall. But with AmigaOS it's eaily fixable. And with Windows you have to reinstall most applications when you reinstall Windows, which don't have to do with AmigaOS.. just copy some libs at a worst case scenario.

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.

And the crap shutting down procedure just sucks. AmigaOS is great in the way that you don't have to shutdown.. just press the powerbutton.

Regarding the intuitiveness... hmm Windows isn't exactly great.. I mean Shutdown is located under the Start-menu... really intuitive isn't it...

[PPCRulez]

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.

I've turned off all services that I don't use. But the fact is that if you put 256MB RAM in a Win2k box and then put 384MB in the same box with the same configuration you don't get 128MB extra free physical memory. It probably caches stuff... (god knows what)

BTW 64MB is still an insane amount of memory for an OS.

Regristry hell is still very much present even if the DLL problems isn't as bas as they used to be.

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.

Well.. it's not unwillingness... If it were easy to fix a problem with Windows no one would have to reinstall it. Not many users of windows have never had to reinstall the 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.

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. Sure I've had to reset the Win2k machine with the button a few times before and nothing had happened before, but this time it just went dead.

But other than that Win2k is quite stable, sure it crashes sometimes, but not that often.

The day that I tried Opera for windows was the day that I started using Windows more and more, and less of AmigaOS. I really don't like IE. And when I got DOpus for Windows it got even better.. I don't have to use Explorer for file management anymore.

[PPCRulez]

Waccoon wrote:

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!

Which reminds me of another Win2k problem. I have a digital camera a Minolta which is a standard USB Mass Storage Device. It worked perfectly with my Win2k machine for over a year. Tried it on my brothers Win2k machine it found the driver but then nothing happend, the machine just stood there doing nothing, no error messages or anything, it just didn't work. After I had reinstalled Win2k the exact same thing happened on my machine. So, now I can't use the camera on my Win2k machine, but it works perfectly on my Linux machine and always has.

To make this even worse, the camera now works on my brothers win2k machine after he reinstalled win2k.

[PPCRulez]

@ Waccoon

Actually the Minolta Camera I have doesn't have any special drivers. You don't have to (nor can) install any drivers. When attached it uses Microsofts USB Mass Storage Device driver. I will try some of your tips though and see if it works.

I've gotten used to using it under Linux now, since Win2k can be such a pain in the ass sometimes.

[PPCRulez]

A4000Bear wrote:
WinXP: Actually quite stable, but there is a really annoying habit where it boots up, then I have to wait a few minutes before I could launch an application. During this period, the hard drive is not being accessed. I was never able to find out why this was happening. Linux did not exhibit this behaviour.

This behaviour is really strange and has happened on my mothers laptop. Sometimes it just waits a minute or something, doing absolutely nothing (you can move the mouse etc but you can't launch applications). Sometimes it boots and starts without this delay and sometimes this happens.

Also regarding the statements that problems is the users fault is really ignorant statements.

[PPCRulez]

B00tDisk wrote:

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."

My keyboard died and I had to do a hardware reset.. and Boom.. Windows2k didn't boot anymore. A good OS shouldn't be able to be destroyed that easily.

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!"

The analogy with the car and my experience above would be something like a got a flat tire had to turn of the engine. When I changed tyre and tried to start the car it just didn't start anymore

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.

True some hardware is flaky, and really cheap stuff should be avoided. But sometimes good brand name hardware isn't much better anyway. And when Linux can run stable on the same hardware that Win2k can't run stable on.. then it can't be a hardware fault.

Actually I don't find win2k particularly unstable.. it's quite stable and I'm pretty satisfied with it. But the times that it do crash I'm afraid that it will not start again. Something that I don't have to worry about with Linux or AmigaOS.

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?

Yes, but with 128MB you better have a fast harddrive. And still 64-128MB for just running the OS is bloat in my book, but Linux is quite bloated also when you want to use a decent gui. Doesn't matter that RAM and HD's are cheap.. an OS shouldn't require that amount of RAM. The OS can't be very well optimized when it uses that kind of memory footprint.

Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".

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...

And that is exactly the kind of attitude among programmers that leads to bloat and unoptimized software. RAM and HD is cheap so who cares if it's optimized. Just let people buy more RAM and better CPU's.

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.

Still I can have AmigaOS with MiamiDx, Poseidon (for USB), Turboprint, Apache Web-server all running at startup and still it takes less than 15 seconds to boot. AmigaOS is really efficent and so are all it's programs. Which gives even greater speeds when run on something like a MorphOS/AOS v4 box with a G3@600Mhz

But with Win2k it takes ages to boot. WinXP is alot faster at boot, although it's nowhere near the AmigaOS boot times.

And with AmigaOS just press the power button when you want to turn off the computer. No ridiculous shutdown stuff.

[PPCRulez]

The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.

I don't agree with AOS needing more builtin services. I prefer to have a choice of for example network stack. Look at how much better the Amiga TCP/IP stacks are just because you have a choice. It would be accepteble to trade of memory usage for speed. But speed isn't particular good in Windows and it has a large memory footprint. In fact Windows has speed issues. Sometimes you can click on something and it just takes a while before something happens. Multitasking isn't exactly Windows strongest point. ANd we shouldn't even mention the horrible Virtual Memory implementation.

And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.

I find the memory usage of Windows unaccepeble even when running a bare minimum system.

[PPCRulez]

Glaucus wrote:
Yes and no. Often caches compensate for a sub-systems latency. The CPU's instruction/data cache for example. Sure we could build computers with memory as fast as registers (other architectural issues aside), but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars per PC. So for reasons of cost we decide to make cheaper memory so that we can have more of it, and to get around it's slow access time we use some cache, which isn't as fast as a register but way better then main memory. Same goes with hard drive access. There's lots of sub systems that benefit from a cache simply because optimizing for both speed and memory (if at all possible) often means you take a huge hit in cost.

Yes, but that is a bit different. Now we are talking about hardware caches. With extremly fast small memory. Harddrive cahces in memory can also increase speed of the harddrive.

But talking about system caches is another thing. Windows seems to cacge all kinds of wierd stuff like GUI elements and stuff. Try freeing up memory (with some tool that allows this) and you'll see Windows reduced to a crawl for a while until it has cached GUI elements again. This is bad... using memory for caching GUI shouldn't be necessary if it were optimized.

And btw, you can replace the standard WindowsXP services, but rarely does one really need to. And yes, AOS does need more built in services, that is after all what an OS is for. I mean, it really wasn't that long ago before even the GUI was an optional "service", we've just taken it for granted. Someone who's first computer was an Amiga would expect an OS to provide them with multitasking, a file system, a GUI with windows, buttons, menus and icons, audio support, etc. However things have changed and today's users demand more things, like memory protection, virtual memory, built-in TCP support with DHCP, firewall and other advanced features, built-in OpenGL (or other similar system), built-in media player with plug-in support for more codecs, etc. Expectations have gone up and it's up to the current Amiga care takers to meet those expectations.

Depends on what you mean with built in services. I agree that the OS should include the things you stated above. But they should be optional during install,a nd not just thrown in when you install the OS.