XP is garbage

The latest Mandrake distros are easy enough to install and seem pretty solid on several computers now for me. My only complaint is their commercial approach makes it hard to install the latest patches etc. I only do standard apps such as office/internet/mail etc., so I dont need M$ much at all. Have installed Kdevelop's latest version after a bit of a struggle, but this is a terrific IDE for code (C/C++, PERL,PHP,scripting, Python etc) The machine works in a home network with XP machines and a Linux firewall. The XP computers are pretty buggy, but then the kids are always downloading stuff and picking up all sorts of garbage

John Lark> >

Hello Jeff,

Might have been online. Nowadays that gets to be a drag. Last time I went to another store to look at a steamer to clean our tile floor. It was in the ads in the morning papers. Oh, it's probably only available online, they said. 40 wasted miles of driving.

Problem is, unless you can touch stuff you don't know whether it is solid or on the flimsy side. So I only buy what I already know, in my case Dell. Their low-end systems actually come really close to Walmart's in price.

Regards, Joerg

You're good! I've been told that Sony tries its best to make this impossible.

Sure, you had normal hardware. It wasn't in the manufacturer's interest to make it hard for you to install an OS.

You don't need to find a license for NT, if the system you bought came with XP installed. Buried away in the EULA for XP is this paragraph below that basically says that you can install over XP with 2000, NT, or 98, using any old disc you have around, if I interpret it correctly.

• Use of Previous Version Of Software. In lieu of installing and using Microsoft Windows XP Professional SOFTWARE, you may install, use, access, display and run ONE of the following versions: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Windows NT Workstation version

The NT design was lead by one of the (of I think, two) co-authors of Dec's VMS kernal. They finally got desperate enough to bring in a real programmer. Too bad that, given the existing Microsoft constraints, he couldn't make it as good as VMS.

John

Well then you microsoft shill, how come you don't seem to know that XtremelyPissy is Windwoes2000? Where do you think Xp came from? It ain't windows98 dude. Its windows 2000.

It took dingdong bill ten years to realized dos was dead, and finally he used a decent kernel and made a fair product by adding video and hardware support to a very good OS. Of course, adding that stuff hurts reliability, but it takes a real microsoft fan to diss win2000 and prance around about XP, when in fact, they are both pretty much the same thing...

You comments show that you don't even know where XP came from. I will help you. Its NT, which came from OS/2.

You are just a microsoft shill. Lots of them live in newsgroups to spread the 'good news' that XP is great. People who use it, and dislike it, are not going to be paying much attention to someone who talks like a telemarketer, phrase after phrase after phrase.

When you explain, from a purely techincal point of view, why an OS would have any problems when an application is located somewhere besides the default, then you can gain some credibility, but a disk location is a disk location, and even the mighty XP cannot look at the table, and decide that something is not where it wants it to be, especially when the installation program allows for someone to put stuff in a 'non standard' location.

I am dying to here why an XP machine with Photoshop on C:\\documents\\apps\\stuff\\downhere\\underneath\\settings\\othercrap\\lookatme\\adobe\\bin\\exe\\files\\photoshop will run rock solid, and one with photoshop on D:\\photoshop will crash and burn twice a day.

Good luck with that one.

I think you should take his advice. I only know about this stuff from two dozen years of designing such things. Using a virtual PC still requires the use of the OS software, so if you don't like XP, using it in VPC avails you nothing.

Try to remember also, that some people just cannot stand to be wrong, and other people think that having a keyboard and a monitor is all that is required to be considered wise and skilled.

If it needs more RAM to be faster, its not faster. It just has more RAM. Give your regular XP more RAM, and guess what? Yep, it runs faster. Forget the hype, and the web page liars, and use a little common sense. It will do wonders for you. Not everything you read on a web page is a true fact

When you get your Windows set up the way you want it (notice I didn't say *like* it), you can set a savepoint. Save all your work to network drives on the host PC, and when you shut down VMWare, simply revert to the savepoint - and all the inevitable accumulating cruft is magically gone!

VMWare is the first virtual PC that runs direct on the silicon without interpretation - Windows under Linux is sometimes actually *faster* than native on the same hardware. You do need more RAM, but that's a fact of life anyhow.

Clifford Heath.

David Cutler, who I've heard described as "one of the most disagreeable persons you might ever meet." :-) Of course, having never met the man, I wouldn't know, but I take this to mean that Dave probably had strong opinions about how an OS should work and didn't care to debate the topic with those who disagreed. (Although he was occasionally overruled -- in NT, mutuxes are called "mutants" internally because Cutler didn't like the way they were implemented.)

C:\\documents\\apps\\stuff\\downhere\\underneath\\settings\\othercrap\\lookatme\\adobe\\bin\\exe\\files\\photoshop

This is far more likely to be Adobe's problem than Microsoft's...

Frithiof is living in some la-la land where apparently the "default configuration" of the machine works well enough for him; the idea that it "should" work well enough for everyone else is of course naive. Heck, even the default configuration has plenty of bugs and security problems, as witnessed by the many service packs and security patches Microsoft provides.

Although I still think XP is a decent OS...

Lots of googl-able stuff, like this...

John

I think the problem is Outside of the Box, about 40 cm from the screen!

No it is not - Something might, like virus or yourself acidentally enabling folder sharing with the internet (the funny folders it *does* create for itself are invisible *unless* made visible by user poking around where user should not really go (unless he/she/it knows what will/can happen)

Running stuff like that is what's scary: How do you know that the 3-rd party product work and is even compatible with whatever instance of XP you have (after many upgrades)?

There is no need for "utilities" in win XP except for a Virus Scanner.

That's because you screwed it up (or your computer is broken)!

There are three kinds of people who will suffer under XP:

2) The "gadgetteer" - the person who *just must have* a huge package of arcane "system utilities" acquired over a long period and seldom compatible with the OS version at hand, (said utilities mostly duplicating functionality which the OS actually has implemented correctly anyway).

The people, who do not have problems do the following:

Let XP and applications install *where they want*, *with the configuration they want* on *one single partition*.

i.e. Stop Interfering With the Tools! Go with the flow, Let XP and - everybody else i.e. the apps - do "their thing" and it will work! Guaranteed!!

XP is an OK product - the First out of Microsoft.

If you MUST "configure" get Linux!

Probably does - if it has an ECU or ABS

Probably Toaster has joined Legion too - my pop-up toaster has a CPU in it.

Win2K in a nutshell - it is crap, about as bad as a 1995 Win-NT with the

We have it here, Corporate Install. So I get to compare with XP everyday.

The problem is first and foremost that the desktop sucks, there is about

Linux is shared Infrastructure - something to build a great product from. Linux is not a product per se; letting the Users build a desktop system is like shipping a container of automotive parts to people and expect them to build great cars for themselves.

A lot of the Telecom infrastructure these days run on various Linux incarnations; because it is non-ipr-encumbered, stable, there are "batteries included" (i.e. Tools), and the Source is there to version control :-)

That is because there is no "Microsoft Problem", it's a "user meets complex system with internals exposed" problem:

The problem is that when you give control of complex tools with not-entirely-undrestood dependencies into the hands of users, they *will* break something beyond their ability to repair. Users break windows, they break Linux, they *try* to break other things like Mobile Phones but since the software is flashed in, they do not have so much luck ;-)

Or think about if TV's came with the casings removed, 20% of all users would instantly kill themselves while breaking the TV - TV's work reliably because the users cannot get into them. ;-)

So could computers.

Actually, it's a mutex, which is a form of semaphore.

semaphore - defn. - two.

John

You are wasting your time replying to someone who doesn't listen to reason and who thinks that personal attacks strengthen his arguments. I advise killfing and moving on to those of us who wish to have a civil discussion about the topic at hand.

If it does, it runs on QNX or some other RTOS, not Windows.