At 1:37 pm -0400 4/25/02, David W. Fenton wrote: >What makes you think the Mac scenario doesn't involve a boot manager? > >There are plenty of boot managers for Windows that will do what you want.
David -- I didn't and don't want to fan a platform war -- I think they usually have as much meaning as two kids screaming, "My dad's bigger than your dad." What I was trying to do was amend what I saw as a failure to communicate basic differences in the philosophy and execution of the two operating systems. Yes, there are boot managers that will allow you to boot into multiple versions of Windows and even Linux variants. All of the ones that I have looked into (admittedly not in great detail in years) have been third party hacks that run behind the operating system's back and tend to break with the next OS update. Microsoft seems to try to put up as many roadblocks as it can to keep you from using multiple OS versions and copies of your current OS on the same computer. Also, though it's getting better these days, some applications get upset when the Windows directory isn't where and named what they thought it should be, and get even more upset when they are installed somewhere other than the C: drive. Some even get upset when they are installed in a sub-directory of the C: drive. (I put one of those on my dad's old Windows 95 laptop last month and it crashed the whole system when it couldn't find its folder in the root directory.) On the Mac you just tell the computer, "Next time you wake up I want that folder over there to be the boot System," and it just does it. Nothing you then install or change affects the old System, just the new System. Programs never have a problem with this because they never look for the System Folder in a particular place; they just ask for the currently "blessed folder" and work their way from there. I like being able to easily boot from multiple Systems because I can always boot from a scratch monkey when I'm unsure of a program. Installing anything on my Windows machines makes me nervous because I never know if I will be able to _completely_ get rid of it and it's modifications to the Windows folder and registry, and whether it replaced a .dll that I really need and have no idea how to get a new copy of. >Nothing changes the basic assertion, that it's silly for the folder names >and locations (relative to the boot directory or not) for system-defined >folders to be hardwired in applications or in the OS. Yes. I agree with you. I think it was some Mac-user-to-Mac-user grousing that started this whole thread. Apple has decided that there should be an "Applications" folder to contain applications and a "Documents" folder to contain documents in OS X (and equivalent home folders for individual users' non-shared applications and documents). This is a very Unix idea and seems to work well on multiple-user systems, especially those that map all of their hard disks into a large virtual drive. It's also antithetical to the way many Mac users approach their systems -- a lot of us have very free-form structures for our program and data storage organization. This isn't wired into the operating system to any great degree. The grousing was about the fact that Apple and some of the other big players (e.g. Adobe) have been writing their updaters so that they fail if they can't find the old versions of their programs in the Applications folder of the boot drive. This is particularly brain-dead when you consider how easy it would be for them to search for their old version. I suspect that this behavior will change, but there may be some rough sailing for those of us with more complex organizational schemas before it does.... Best wishes, -=-Dennis -- _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
