On 12 Oct 2006 at 23:18, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > At 05:50 PM 10/12/06 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote: > >Where have you been Dennis? This has been the case since the > >introduction of machine-based authorization in WinXP back in 2001 or > >2002 (whenever XP came out). > > My family's computers continue to function flawlessly because no one > else touches their configuration or installs software. It's so cool > when my wife comes home from the hospital to her lowly 300MHz Celeron > box and says she can't stand how slow their brand new WinXP computers > are.
But don't you *every* have to install anything, hardware or software? In Win9x, this entails many more reboots than on recent NT-based versions of Windows (Win2K and WinXP). All sorts of configuration changes can be made without reboots, which is substantially more convenient than having to wait for a machine to restart. > >I have to say that > >Win9x is horrid in comparison to a more modern version of Windows. > >There is just no contest at all -- the NT-based versions of Windows > >are far, far easier to use and configure and administer. > > As far as I'm concerned, no. There are so many more steps to make XP > work, it's terribly slow and loaded down with junk. It took me weeks > to get the stuff cleared off the laptop, all the slow eye candy and > animations scoured out, to the point that my fancy 2005 Intel > processor laptop with XP Pro now works as fast as my 98SE system and > its overclocked AMD processor from 2001. > > I know you and Johannes think XP is a peach. I can't speak for Johannes, but I hate XP. My preferred version of Windows is Windows 2000. But I can easily make XP workable. > I think it stinks. It has > added nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to my computing 'experience' > except obscurity. Programs that are flakey in Win98SE (like Finale > 2006) are still flakey in XP. WinXP locks up and programs crash. And > all its famed uptime means nothing when it gets a little slower each > day and still needs rebooting to have a reliable audio session. I haven't seen that with XP or any other version of NT. > There's not one single thing I like about XP. The stability means nothing to you? [] > >legally, if you had an OEM Win98 installed on > >your PC, you aren't supposed to be moving it to a different PC. Read > >the EULA -- it's in there. The only difference with the authorization > > is that the EULA is now enforced. > > I didn't have an OEM Win98 installed on my desktops. I've paid for > installations and upgrades since Win3.1/DOS6. Well, if you did the same with WinXP, you wouldn't have the problems described in the article with the disallowing of moving an OEM Windows installation to a new computer. > >I have never encountered any problems with WinXP authorization > >because I don't believe in upgrading hardware. > > Maybe your customers have the money. They aren't spending much money. The key is *where* they spend it. They spend it at the beginning and leave the machine alone once it's up and running. This means it lasts 5 years, easily, with no tweaking, no upgrades. Some of my clients keep their machines as long as 7 years before purchasing a new one. After the initial cost, there is no ongoing cost, which is cheaper than constant upgrades. > I don't. I've been a freelance > writer and composer since 1979, and there are months where my income > is almost nothing, especially after the tech crash of 2001. I can't > buy machines and peripherals when my gross is $540 like it was in > September, and $40 so far halfway through October. That's why I keep > my hardware and software tuned up and incrementally upgraded. I am > still running two 100% reliable parallel port printers, for example, > and a lot of legacy hardware that has artistic uses (like the > three-pass scanner. which can create amazing effects by moving the > original during the scan). This is not an office, it's a creative > studio. It has to work to my vision, not some corporate bookkeeping > paradigm a la John Hodgman (the Mac ads have got that right). NT-based Windows is vastly superior to Win9x. You just don't know it. [] > So no, David, I haven't really been paying attention to Microsoft for > a few years. I haven't needed to. You're missing out on a much more pleasant computing experience, in my opinion. Since I've been using Win2K, life is much, much easier. I can leave my PC on for months without rebooting, and the OS never crashes, ever. I can add and remove hardware, configure and reconfigure networking components, and none of it requires a reboot. Ill-behaved applications may crash, but they don't bother anything else running on the machine. I, too, was able to keep Win9x running relatively smoothly because I cared for it properly. But NT-based Windows is so much easier to keep running and can handle so much more that there is simply no contest. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
