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.

[Miked]

mr_a500 wrote:
No, no - don't change it. Microsoft has decided that this is the way you should be working. They know best. I always trust large capitalist corporations to decide what's best for me... and you should too. (yeah, right)

When Microsoft says things like "We design software to work the way you want to work", what they actually mean is "We design software to work the way we want you to work". I spent years trying to work the way I want and nearly went insane fighting Windows. The worst thing is that there's no way to boycott Microsoft. Every possible job you can get now requires you to use Windows. (unless you're one lucky MF)

I think that is one of the reasons I now have an interest again in the Amiga platform.  Windows is a horrible experience; in fact, the whole pentium experience is horrible.  Even the Mac isn't all that great of an experience.

Ahhh, I long for the days where the Amiga had a little bit of software support, and commodore was still in business.


-Miked

[mr_a500]

...Even the Mac isn't all that great of an experience.

Yes and I only just learned that last year. For years, I thought Macintosh was great - probably because I never actually used one (just played around in stores from time to time) and I thought the OS looked amazing. Then when OSX was coming out (around the same time I was sick to death of Windows) I started to become obsessed with Mac. I was waiting for just the right time to buy one and while I waited I decided to upgrade my old A500. I became more and more amazed by what the old thing could do.

Anyway, when a friend got a brand new Mac, I went to their house to load my iPod. After a few hours I became sick with disgust (well, not disgust - that's reserved for Windows - maybe "depressing sickly sadness" :-(). It was way better than Windows of course, but it wasn't as fun to use as I thought. It's not just that I'm used to something else. Lots of things aren't as well thought out as they could have been. iTunes has some nice features mixed with some really stupid and frustrating "features".

I probably will eventually get a Mac (what other choice have I got?), but it won't be that exciting anymore. It'll just be like buying a waffle iron. Yay.

[oddmario]

I probably will eventually get a Mac (what other choice have I got?), but it won't be that exciting anymore. It'll just be like buying a waffle iron. Yay.

I have been using MS computers since the dos days and had my share of problems as everybody else.
Anyway the latest years i have been using Linux Ubuntu release. There is only one thing that i havent figured out yet. And that is how to get my Bluetooth mouse to work. Except for that thing it is far superiour to XP in 9 out of 10 cases.So you do have a choice. Ubuntu works great.
Keep your Amiga though :-)

[srg86]

Windows is fine for me. There is nothing in it that really gets me. Still that's the NT side, the 9x side was bad.

I've never got on with linux my self, mainly with device drivers I've nearly pulled my hair out.

[motrucker]

If you are using one of the "name brand" computers, such as Compaq, HP, etc., etc - you should have gone to the parent companies web sight first to upgrade their drivers, etc., then install SP2.
MS (as much as I LOVE them) has a fair list of problems in a FAQ part of their site.
SP2 usually does work. I use a machine I built, with an Asus mobo, 3000 AMD CPU (2.4Gh), 1Gb RAM, ATI 850 AGP video card to a ProView 19" LCD, sound blaster card, with a 160Gb hard drive, sony DVD dual layer +-RW and a reg. CDRW, with Windows XP home with SP2. I was going to throw the computer away until I installed SP2. Since then it is so stable it scares me! It has games played on it (DOOM 3, Far Cry, Battlefield 2, etc., etc) and photo/graphics work besides the usual data/WP/scanning/etc., etc..
I have become firm believer in building (assembling may be a better way to put it) your own computer.
As long as a computer works, and doesn't cost an arm & a leg, what difference does the OS really make?

[mikeymike]

@ Tenacious's original post

I have a similar-ish, very odd problem on Win2k that I haven't manage to figure out anything about or fix.

If I go into Start > Search > Files and Folders, do a search for anything, then right-click on a file/folder and select 'open containing folder', another search window appears (instead of an explorer window), and I can't close the parent search window for about 30 seconds, but I can do other stuff with it.

No viruses, spyware, etc.  Win2k SP4.  Survives a service pack reinstall, and doesn't just affect one user (tried creating another).  Also tried a scan with sysinternals.com's 'rootkitrevealer', no dice.  Nothing interesting came up through file or registry monitoring, no errors in event log.

I reinstalled late last year to get rid of the problem, which it did (as I do a wipe-clean install on my Windows partition), but then it appeared again some point later (like a few months I think), and I couldn't track it down to anything I did, because obviously I don't search for stuff on my computer very often, but when I can't use that functionality, it is very annoying and tedious to work around it.

- edit - whoa!  just fixed it, cool  I added a function into the folder context menu, so that I could browse the folder in xnview, apparently it doesn't like spaces in the name for the new menu item.  bizarre.