----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas M. Albright" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "GNHLUG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 10:48 PM Subject: Re: linux/windows security
> And yet my girlfriend, who has XP on a p4 1+G with 512M of ram has to > reboot everytime she puts in a game for our kid. Apparently the system > doesn't have enough resources to play the game even though nothing else > is running. Very few people credit the real source of most crashes: drivers. The game obviously uses some feature of some driver somewhere (probably video) that crashes the machine. Otherwise, if it WERE a resource issue, you would be able to open 35 copies of Outlook and accomplish the same thing (crash the machine.) But I bet you can't do it that way. I run Windows ME at work (in addition to Linux of course.) Everyone I talk to says ME is a POS. Everyone who says this says it's slow and crashes a lot. NOBODY I have encountered who trashes ME has bothered to go in and turn off all the automatic stuff like System Restore and Automatic Updating that are not included in Win9x. They also have not bothered to track down the cause of crashes, by either changing configurations, or updating (or in some cases, backdating) drivers. The slowness and unreliability of ME is, in my opinion, an Urban Legend. You wouldn't say, "Linux is a POS" if your X server kept crashing, right? Well, because Windows is all integrated and most people can't discern a video problem from a network problem from a disk access problem, it's all a POS to them. The other half of the problem is that Microsoft, unlike the Linux community, gives up NO information to the user about what is going on (or not going on) in their system. In Linux, there are messages and logs galore, mostly an offshoot of the shared development process. It makes it very easy to diagnose system problems in this environment (except I'm not sure how much use the message, "I can't find root and I want to scream!" is.) ;o) As with any system, a computer is a system, and in order to determine the problem, you need to test each component to determine where the problem is. Because of Windows' drawbacks, many people cannot do this. [snip comparison of linux' uptime to that of my SMC router] Rich Cloutier SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES President, C*O www.sysupport.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
