XP is garbage

What is this all about? Virtual PCs have been around for years, but you still have to own and operate M$ windows to run it as a virtual machine. All VMware is, along with its cousins and brothers, is another layer of bloat to add to whatever you are running.

Call back when I can run Protel, PADS, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, etc without using a M$ operating system.

JB

I didn't say one could, I said comparing the Windows2K operating system with a GUI, to the Linux operating system without the GUI is not a reasonable thing to do.

Before XP/2000 you could just run DOS mode and windows was quicker than anything linux had at the time. OS/2 can be run without a GUI and there is nothing faster, more stable and more reliable than that, but few would want to use it that way.

Anytime I lament to a Linux user that I find Linux to be too slow and system intensive to be considered useful to me, the response is always "take off the GUI" I think that is a pointless argument. If an SUV gets crappy gas mileage, strip off the sheet metal/plastic and gut the frame. Then that SUV will be a sleek, efficient, ..... unusable vehicle. Hardly a viable solution.

Relax.... Its gonna be alright

Oddly enough, for many folks, OOo's #1 attribute is its ability to open WinWord DOCs better than WinWord. ....or was the DOC chocked full of macros?

Thanks goodness. One down.....

What the hell are you guys doing to corrupt your WinXP installs? I've heard bad reports about the SP2, but other than that XP is more stable and robust than 2K.

I've used 'em all. 3.11 was okay, 256 colors and all. Winsock and Win32s was fun. What a learning experience. Crashes and bugs were common. Then NT/95 came out. NT was not available to the public. 95 sucked balls. So much so, that Microsoft had to make 95b and 95 OSR2 just to patch major bugs. 95 crashed religiously, due to its poor memory management. Then came 98. Leaps and bounds better than 95, but still has the same memory management issues because it was based on the earlier kernel. Dreaded "Blue Screen Of Death" had become a world-known phrase. Daily reboots were in order, but one could probably go a week if the system was well-maintained. Then comes Win2k, a novel idea modelled from the NT core but for consumers. ('Bout damn time.) Win2k was pretty good to me. SP4 caused a lot of problems though. The memory manager was much more robust in 2k, preventing most dreaded page-faults and lockups. The system drivers started moving from real-mode to protected-mode, making even system-level routines and services fault-tolerant.

Enter: XP. All I have to say about XP Pro SP1 is that my box gets rebooted once a month at the most, and I can't remember the last time I saw an exception error

- maybe last year sometime? And this is on a tweaked out, overclocked AMD system with a gig of ram, SATA RAID+0, DVDRW and CDRW, nVIDIA GeForce 5600 ultra /w video I/O, USB HDD/scanner/camera, PIC programmer, etc... I have ZERO complaints about XP's stability. It is by far, the most stable M$ OS I've ever seen. Where you guys are getting your piss and vinegar from, sounds more like an alterior motive than statistical data IMHO.

I have tried Mandrake and a few other 'nixes. The Matrix screensaver was cool, but I couldn't run most of the M$ power-apps on it like Proteus VSM or Sony Vegas Video and there is no comparible equivalent. If another OS existed which could do what Winblows can do or better, then I'd be interested. It sucks that M$ dominates the marketplace... but they don't HAVE to be dominating the marketplace - I don't see anyone else stepping up. That said, I'd love to code a new OS, knowing what we know now. The new 64-bit processors include many new registers, making software development a whole new ballgame. It is true that Windows OS's just keep getting bigger and more bloated. But it has to, to retain backwards compatibility. Eliminating that bottleneck alone, would be a revolutionary improvement. Of course, that means all new apps, and nobody would buy a new OS (even if it was the greatest on Earth) if no apps were made for it. Oh well.

-- "I can conceptualize what infinity is, but I cannot imagine it." MCJ 200406

No probs here (XPHome SP2 on a Dell Dimension 2400 w/ Celeron @

Aha... I don't play games at all (OK, rarely Spider Solitaire).

I'm wondering if it isn't more a matter of user-app-specific troubles than "wrong". Why else would you mention "game machine"? Could be that XP remains fairly stable if you don't ask it to do too much. Might influence the stats if you break them down to include those trying to get it to do many things, especially at once.

Still have two boxes running that; BSOD maybe twice/monthly each. Never had to reinstall, but then they've never been online.

Ain't that the truth.

Mark L. Fergerson

Try Slackware. It runs great on 32MB of RAM and 520MB of hard disk. Use Icewm instead of Gnome or KDE, or simply stay on the command line. Use Links or w3m for your browser. Then come back and tell me whether Linux is as bloated as Windows.

Also see [

Hello Joel,

I don't think so (yet). Besides what Guy said there is also liability and regulatory burden. While an open source collection of software might work nicely there are lots of applications that require a thorough and seamless design history file. For example, all medical applications. "Oh, this was designed by peers but I am not sure who did exactly what" isn't going to fly before the FDA.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Guy,

Thing is, I cannot decide. There is a certain number of programs I need to run for business reasons. If there is only one that runs under Windows and nothing else I am stuck. So is everybody else.

Regards, Joerg

You had a choice, and you chose to install everything and then to run Gnome or KDE. The latest version of Slackware runs just fine on my 100 Hhz 486 with 100MB of RAM.

So you refuse to give up the eye candy, yet you complain when it slows down your old laptop. Microsoft, KDE and Gnome have all found that running a feature-rich GUI with lots of eye candy uses a fair amount of system resources. Unless you can write a GUI that does what the Microsoft, KDE or Gnome desktop does while being fast on your P166, I suggest that you face the fact that the feature-rich GUIs use a lot of system resources. "But Cap'n, she's goin' warp six as it is! If we go any faster, those dilythium grytals canna' take the strain!"

You said before "as bloated as windwoes." Now you are saying that Windows is faster. Which is it?

You could have spent that 50 hours working at $10/hour and bought a mac-mini for $500. [

Don't know - I am running on a quad-processor Compaq 5500R - no USB.

Please note that Slackware 10.1 uses 2.4 by default, but has a precompiled 2.6 kernel in /testing on CD 2. All the reports that I have seen say that 2.6 runs fine. There may be differences in hotplug USB flash drives support.

BTW, RUNT [

"When anyone resorts to personal attacks, it is almost always because they are losing an argument." -The Happy Heretic

In the brick & mortar outlets? Last I heard, all their Linux products were online-only.

It appears they are offering it as a final cost-cutter (on their bottom-of-the-line items).

Actually, you aren't stuck and neither is anyone else. Look here:

Try it and see. Hit CTL-Alt-Delete to run task manager, then terminate the explorer.exe process. Let me know haw that works out for you.

Hello Guy,

Maybe it works for much of the software. But usually you get stung when some driver isn't available or when HW-near stuff such as a uC programmer has to be operated, in my case for the MSP430.

Pass-through USB and other pass-throughs have been tried before. Most of the time it ain't working or at least you could be losing features like step debugging. Then when that happens and you have to call tech support they won't have a clue how your custom virtual machine runs and can't help you.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Guy,

Nice. But besides Office Suite this PC seems geared towards gamers, or kids. And 128MB RAM ain't much in these times where programmers think RAM is the same as cheese crackers.

Now that is indeed a good deal. When I was young there was no way I could own a computer, even building one required lots of savings. Nowadays you can buy them for a song.

Walmart is certainly a motor when it comes to pushing a certain item into the marketplace, just because of their sheer size and sales volume. But I vaguely remember that when I looked at their laptops they were Windows based.

Regards, Joerg

Jim Thompson wrote: > I thought it stood for eXPerimental ;-)

Oh. I thought it stands for eXasPerating. :-)

Ted