XP is garbage

They call it "impress". It will read and write PP files. There can be font problems when it converts but other than that it does everything needed.

John, were you the kid in jr. high school who threw the stink bomb in the room and locked the door?

XP, indeed!

-- Please, no "Go Google this" replies. I wouldn't ask a question here if I hadn't done that already.

DaveC snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net This is an invalid return address Please reply in the news group

I read in sci.electronics.design that Guy Macon wrote (in ) about 'XP is great, *** is a moron', on Thu, 14 Apr 2005:

I didn't notice the nature of the subject line, but breaking the thread would have made my response to the ridiculous diatribe meaningless.

I think your asterisks will just prompt anyone who reads the articles to trace the thread back to see who was originally named.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'XP is garbage', on Thu, 14 Apr 2005:

This was a 'feature' of earlier versions. It sounds as though Word didn't start properly.

Check that you haven't had a style generated for you that has 'Space after' set to '156.2 points' or something. You can see the effect if you click on a word and get a black block many lines deep. OCR apps can also do this.

Saving and restarting to correct the problem does rather suggest that the first start-up was buggy.

Good point.

Guy has apparently appointed himself the Miss Manners of this newsgroup; just not as funny.

John

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 19:12:53 +0000 Guy Macon schrieb:

No, just annoying.

Why do you want to share this with us?

You Wanted Windows, did you not, Knowing Full Well what it is!?

What I am advocating is that you will have to live with it because *it will not change*.

It's Broken - do we care How it got broken or any other particulars?? What good would it be to know what failed in your particular spot of the hyperspace defined by all the system parameters one could possibly chance?

You can take it like it is or you can leave it - the "way of pain" is trying to change anything in XP, to "understand" it better.

So, I.O.W; we don't care, Gates didn't care - why should we do more?

To whoever you paid for the PeeCee's - who Else.

Think like the Consumer this product was made for:

You obviously bought a pre-broken system, the system did not work when you got it, the business you got it from *will* take it back or fix it - it is not your problem who's fault it may be. Your problem ends with shipping it to them under the warranty.

As long as there is demand, that is what they will make. Just accept the world as it is. You are fighting gravity.

PS:

You *do* know how they make them preinstalls so reliable, don't you?

You see, The real objective of the preinstall is to slap the OS onto the harddrive in the cheapest way possible. So, to minimise the work involved, they load up entire batches of harddrives with the OS's configuration from "The Golden Prototype" (i.e. the one that happened to boot) before they assemble and pack the machine. Cuts down on handling and storage management. Speeds assembly. More Money can be made faster - which is the problem Dell is trying to solve for itself.

Now someone, like Purchasing, change something in the machine - BIOS, Motherboard - do you then assume that someone else will go back to the storage in China and take all the drives out, reload the OS verified with the new hardware, and put it all back?

Nahhh - that would kill the 2% margin on the Box.

So if you get the beginning of a run in a particular model everything is probably Happy - if you get a Later Model where maybe the motherboard was made USD 0.0001 Cheaper then .... the OS might not match the machine exactly ..... you are maybe not so Happy!

To be Happy(er) you need to trigger the OS Autodetection again - That Means, Windows being Windows: Re-Install the Box from a CLEAN distribution untainted by Dell.

Oh, it will probably get incrementally better as bugs are found and fixed (until they release a new OS.) XP is far less likely to crash than '98, which is an improvement.

But there are lessons to be learned here. There have been a number of clean, fast, rock-solid, and non-quirky OSs written over the years. What they had in common were a small number of authors using simple, even primitive tools... assembly, Bliss, or plain C. The Microsoft programming model - C++, OOP, DLLs, unlimited module size through virtual memory, event-driven actions, all that - is a disaster as regards reliability and usability. Programmers love this stuff as an intellectual exercize/toy kit/resume padder, but it makes for bad products. Whenever a programmer comes to me and says he can solve a simple problem better by buying a bunch of new tools and using a new CPU, all my alarms go off; he's interested in the process, not the product.

John

Please, no "Go Google this" replies. I wouldn't ask a question here if I hadn't done that already.

Dave,

Sorry, I have no idea what any of that means.

John

My PHB is having me work on a company "brochure" - more of a flyer; anyway, I'm sitting here between assignments annoying you guys, and he tells me to take a look at this file on the file server. OK, I pop up Konqueror in filemanager mode, and there's "Brochure.DOC". Oh, dear, I think to myself - he knows nothing of Linux. But, I double-clicked it, just because he was looming over my shoulder. KOffice opened it up, and reported it as "Microsoft Word 6.0 doc file". It wasn't terribly pretty but it _did_ open it; but then I was afraid to change it and try to save it back as a MS .doc file, because who knows what M$ is going to do with it?

So, I booted Doze, did my editing, and also I have Paint Shop Pro 4, which I'm really happy with for poking around with images.

And, interestingly, I was able to arrange half-a-dozen pictures on page 2, in Word, by using columns.

If I had it to do again, I'd use HTML. :-)

So, in summary, I guess I'd say I just use whatevere tool gets the job done. W2K isn't really _terrible_, as long as I don't go on-line with it and ring the viral dinner bell. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

You need a better newsreader. Pan threads them just fine - it probably threads them by tracking references, rather than relying on the subject line.

You might even have an option about how it threads stuff.

Cheers! Rich

Somebody needs to teach your friend about drive partitions. I try to repartition such that there's one of the minimum possible size for the OS, and NEVER store anything but the OS itself on that partition - put ALL of your data on a second or third partition. That way, when the OS crashes and you have to reformat/reinstall, you only lose the OS, and not all of your data.

And, he might not know that it's entirely possible to make a directory: D:\Program Files , and install your apps there. They probably won't stay installed when the registry goes away, but at least your data and options will still be there.

Good Luck! Rich

Well said. I use a 4GB partition for the OS, and it should have a size of maximum 8GB. Install windows there, and the programs which have to be installed to work, that is the programs which will stop working when windows breaks.

Use a partition saving program, like norton ghost, to save an image of the C: drive, so you can restore it to a known and clean state whenever needed. If you find programs which you need, make a new partition image including those programs. I have two images saved, one is a very fresh and clean windows installation, the other is the one I actually use, with my favorite programs installed.

I have a D:\Programs folder with a lot of programs which need no installation. I often try out freeware programs by installing them on C, then I try moving the working folder to D:\Programs, delete the installation folder on C, and test if the program works from D.

My most used and valued programs are such no-install programs.

And while I am at the subject of software:

The best program in the world is Total Commander, available for free from

In the latest version TC has a built-in thumbnail viewer, very practical way to see what images and other files look like. TC has so many features that you can explore it for years without realizing its full powers. And with the hundreds of addon programs made by others it becomes even more useful and covers most routine needs of a computer user.

I have been doing that for years. One day my former employer got a virus running on the LAN that disabled the anivirus - by looking for it in C:\Program Files...

For the same reason, I install to \WIN2K rather than \WINNT.

Makes backing up and restoring those apps a snap as well.

Sounds quite useful. I will check it out.

BTW,

I download programs into a D:\Installed\ directory, then unzip from there and install in d:\program_files. The zip/installation files of the programs I decide to keep remain in the \Installed directory. When (not if) I have to re-install I have all the stuff I need collected in one place.

OS/2 was *much* cleaner. Simply install all the programs on another disk and drag them to where they're wanted. Backup? Drag it to the backup device.

All my data is on the e: partition, for the stated reasons.

Actually, it still is :-)

There will never be anything quite like the OO WPS. Linux needs it, M$ isn't wise enough to consider it, or smart enough to write it, and it cannot be 'added on' anyway.

I am looking forward to getting back to it one day. Real drag and drop, what a concept! I could leave co-workers with their jaws hanging open by just dragging an app from one drive to another, and showing how it was all still connected, and functional.

Backups? Shoot, ..... xcopy *.* /h/o/t/s/e/r/v to another drive. All done.... Windows? Just a sad little joke in comparison.

JB

I do that as well. Didn't want to get into details tho :-) What I do is xcopy or drag the entire partition to another location, and zip up that 'backup' to store it on a CD/DVD. That way I have a copy of everything I need without having to get it off the CD. Sometimes I get to messing around and screw something up, so I just copy it back from the other drive. So far, I have never needed the stuff off the CD, but its there if I do.

The OS/2 base system on my machine was installed in 1998 and has never been reinstalled since. I have moved it from machine to machine with backups, or just swapping in the hard drive, and fix packs were easily installed. Anyone out there still using their windows install from 1998? :-)

Overall, no matter how each OS/2 user does it, the process is drop dead simple, and makes windows look like a tinker toy with all its "registry/dll/drop it all over the drive and use shortcuts" baloney. Fixing an OS/2 system problem is a piece of cake. I don't even bother trying to fix friend's windows machines. I just tell them to reinstall. Life is too short so they better have their data on another parition. They learn pretty quickly.

I have installed windows apps that don't bother with the registry or anything, and they will run from anyplace, but the way M$ demands it to be done is silly, and not necessary. Its all about control, and lazy programming, no matter how you view it. When someone argues that the registry and path control is necessary, I just show em OS/2 and ask why it can't be done that way instead. Fact is, it could have been, but bill clung to his sad little DOS stuff for way too long.

JB