Ha. Low end ethernet routers

Funny that, MS Word never crashes on me.

I never have any problems.

Many years ago, i hated Visual C++ because it was not ansi complient. Many years ago i thought MS sucked the fat one and linux was great. Many years ago I was a poor hardware designer.

Now I compare what I have achieved with MS compared to what I used to do. Now MS is more stable than linux, it supports more hardware, everyone uses it AND, I can get more windows programmers than I can get linux C++ programmers. Plus there is more money in C# than C++ (or java). I wonder why they are trying to implement c# and the .net framework in linux?

But Bill Gates designed windows all on his own, so I guess its all his fault. I guess he still makes all the technical and legal descisions too. BAhh, I hate people who are succesfull. Thanks Bill.

Hello Andy,

DOS Word did crash on occasion but no more than a couple times a year. WinWord crashes a lot more. The work I do is the same I did in the DOS days, creating module specs with lots of graphics in there. That's when the crashes usually happen.

Oh, and WinWord can't read the old DOS Word files, seems they haven't figured out compatibility. On MS-Works spreadsheet and database MS did a much better job and consequently I plan to keep using these. Those parts of MS-Works have so far never crashed on me even with files that are very heavy on math. The only puzzler is this: When I do math-heavy stuff on the old DOS machine it runs about as fast as on Windows. But on the Win machine the fan keeps coming on all the time and heats my office, same files, same math. The old DOS laptop doesn't have a fan because it doesn't need it ...

Don't know about Linux but Windows became less stable over time IMHO. It bloated a lot and maybe that's why. WRT to my productivity it is about the same as it was under DOS. Integrating graphics can be done a bit faster in Windows but that is being offset by the hard-reset waits after a crash. Some are really, really long, for example when "WinWord has generated errors and is being debugged" and you can't shut down. To mitigate a bit I save every couple minutes and work with two PCs in parallel.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Jim,

NT4 on this PC (rarely ever freezes), Win2k on the office machine (freezes on occasion), XP in the lab (freezes a lot). Somehow I see the trend going in the wrong direction here.

To add insult to injury the NT4 PC has never ever frozen up when booted into DOS.

I had to wrestle with the sales folks a little to get my office computer with Win2k and not XP. Had to pay an extra $100 or so but in hindsight I am glad I spent that money. The lab computer couldn't be delivered with

2k anymore since some of its HW would be incompatible, they said.

The downside is that some of the 'new and improved' software such as compilers won't run on anything but XP.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Jim,

On laptops they usually don't let you do this. Some of the HW in there isn't as generic as it is for desktops. So if you wipe them and install you own stuff chances are that the CD drive won't work or the display might not wake up anymore. That would be a real bummer. At least you'd have to disassemble the whole thing to see what's in there. Dell is pretty good in that you can get that kind of information via their help files but for some other laptops that's not the case.

Same here. If it does what you need it to do, why upgrade?

I have never upgraded an OS except once for DOS. Chances are, I never will.

Regards, Joerg

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:D5Fnf.28799$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...

Nah, you just have a load of rubbish there. There's an easy fix to your problems, but you already have decided that you don't want to hear about it.

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Thanks, Frank.
(remove \'q\' and \'.invalid\' when replying by email)

Well, if you really insist on taking the blame for Microsoft's ineptness... :-)

Real Operating Systems clean out such crap when you kill the offending process.

Drivers and services are another matter, of course. If your drivers are compiled into the kernel, and you've muffed the driver, then you have to restart (pregerably after you fix the driver). Services (Billy-speak for daemons) or loadable drivers have to be restarted, but that's no big deal, so you can afford to keep going while you figure what you screwed up.

John Perry

Hello John,

Exactly. I often get a warning "low on virtual memory" even after closing all apps. Only a re-boot fixes this, for a while. There is no excuse for that.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Frank,

What fix?

I see this purely from a consumer perspective. Why should I have to become more of a PC expert than I was 15 years ago to maintain the same level of reliability? Just imagine what would happen if cars were engineered that way. Actually some are and consequently I won't buy those. Bought the bare bone edition of mine, runs w/o any problems whatsoever for eight years while the new fancy ones around the neighborhood suffer the occasional meeting with the tow truck.

Regards, Joerg

In W2K, you can increase your swap space somewhere in the "Control Panel/ System" applet, under "performance options" or something. I have like a

512MB swap file on one partition, and about 1GB on another, and I don't get that warning. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I am now running XP SP2 on a HP dc7100 at work. The only time I restart is when I end up with some massive memory leak on the app that I am working on, and that is my fault. I have Win2k3 running on 2 host boxes that was installed about a year ago. One has never been restarted, the second was recently restarted due to a hardware failure.

I also have 2 win2k boxes (only cause Sybase ASE 11.5 wont work on

2k3) which have not been restarted in about a year.

All of the above came from NT4 when the business moved. On of the NT4 DR machines has something like 7 years up the sleeve with no restart.

The biggest stability problems I have found are with 3rd party software and drivers, not with the OS itself.

Now as or my home PC (XP sp2), well, that cops a flogging with all the crap and trial software i install. It is pretty much flogged, but still never crashes. Its getting slow, but once again that is all my fault.

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:j0_nf.40038$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...

The fix is: go out and buy a brand new PC, pre-assembled, pre-installed, with a windows office package, such as word, excel etc. And don't even think about being an expert. Just use it. Don't upgrade, don't do any maintenance, don't defrag, don't be smart. Use it. After 4 years, ditch the darn thing, including *everything* (including application software) that came with it, and start all over again.

But you never tried that, did you?

I see that it now has spreaded to cars. In my neighbourhood most cars are pretty new. Perhaps 3-4 years on average. I never see any tow trucks here, expect once or twice for the damned Porsche that belongs to my wife.

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Thanks, Frank.
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Hello Frank,

That's pretty much what I am doing except for throwing them away after four years. Why should I do that if they work as well as ever?

I buy a new one every 2-3 years or so and yes, they are pre-loaded with everything except CAD, compilers and so on. My observation is that the new ones are worse than the old ones in terms of stability :-(

That may be because you live in NL with a pretty mild and even climate. I know it can get cold there, having had to ride my bicycle from a pub in Maastricht back to Vaals when it was -19C. But what gets cars and all the fancy schmantzy electronics in them is continuous heat like we have it here. Several weeks in a row at 40C and the inside of a car almost glows. That's when we see the tow trucks. In Europe I was used to batteries lasting 7-8 years. Here it's four, tops. And when that battery fails it does so quite rapidly. With my car I am able to get home but one with a few dozen micro controllers in there is a different story. It may not even start, and forget about giving it a good push. Doing the jumper cable thing might cause a barrage of relay clicks and a gazillion dashboard lights to dazzle for one last time.

Regards, Joerg

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:Kh2of.33712$q%. snipped-for-privacy@newssvr12.news.prodigy.com...

That is really strange. I won't say that my 2 PC's never crash, but it is certainly not a problem. The only application that tends to make my PC go nutty is Protel, after a couple of hours using that. I blame that on Protel, but with a preventive reset/reboot every coffee break it is not a big deal either.

Perhaps you are running some bad applications that need to be replaced with something newer.

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Thanks, Frank.
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New ones tend to come with a lot more junk pre-loaded than old ones. Buying a PC from Dell's "home" division gets you literally dozens of extra pieces of junk you don't need, and even buying one from their "small business" division gets you a small handful!

The first think I do these days with a new PC from Dell or similar is spend about 20 minutes removing software!

...

What's wrong with his website? Some of us like lean and clean, in lieu of 3 MB active-x dancing paper clips and shit.

Thanks, Rich

Nobody ever lost a contract because their logo didn't spin.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Why do Dell and other assorted idiots have websites that force you to tell them whether you're a home user, a small business or a large business. Say I want a laptop. Do I want the kind of laptop that a business school student might want? A SOHO user? A large company? How the f*ck should I know what they are thinking? Show me *all* your laptops, organized by specifications, dammit, and mind your own business

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Ahh. so its MS that is causing the low memory, not the drivers or 3rd party apps? Thats why I can only run a NT server for 7 years.

Oh shit, i also forgot that my crappy programming tends to sit for weeks before the memory leak means i just turn the PC off cause I couldn't be f***ed stopping the debugger. If I do stop the debugger my memory leaks go away. Then again, i like to see how my app responds to the 'f*ck off' button. Memory leaks rocks, just run one of those expensive IBM Rational thingies over it and all your leaks are found.

Can I offer you some advice? Pay someone to do you a new website.

Hello Frank,

You guys drink more coffee than we do, maybe that's the reason ;-)

It's all pretty standard. IAR sometimes hangs it in the lab, in the office it happens a lot with Word. Mostly when doing really big module specs with a load of graphics in them. Re-install didn't change it much.

For some reason Cadsoft Eagle has never crashed things like your Protel seems to do although the program itself often hangs its print routine (but after forcing it to close the system is fine).

Regards, Joerg