On Friday 16 September 2005 09:13 pm, Brad Bendily wrote: > But, to say "XP is simply unusable" is a statement > made by a person not it touch with reality.
No, I really can't get things done with windows. I'll use it if forced but I've never had to use XP for more than a few minutes but it's always been frustrating. > Many millions of people use XP everyday to get their > business done. People used to live without antibiotics, electricity and running water. It pains me to see people live that way today. People who use XP spend a great deal of their time working around it. Simply booting XP on the laptop disabled wifi and I've heard of it doing worse things to others. Most windows users have to resort to email or physical media to share information because windows networking is so poor. When things are working right, they have to boot every other day. When things are not working right, they have to boot multiple times a day. Placekeeping is difficult on a single screen interface and it's next to impossible through boot cycles. Having to log back into everything, dig up all of the stuff you were working on and remember exactly where you were is difficult enough when It's all right in front of you. The amount of stuff they have to learn to make windows do things is astounding. XP users have to keep up with versions of software to know what programs play nice and what does not. They also have to learn all sorts of UI details. The effort I used to put into making one or two windoze computers work easily translated into five or six free UI including CLI rudiments because apt takes care of other details for me. I don't have enough space to write about the world of windows anti virus, firewalls and "security". Is it worth the price? I don't know anyone who would actually buy Office, for example. Everyone I know who uses it tells me they got their copy with a new computer, from work or less reputable places. On it's own, does XP even have a spell checker? What can you do without that? Honest users will spend hundreds of dollars on software every few years to feed Microsoft's outrageous profit margins. The amount of time spent due to poor place keeping, wipe and reload, daily boots, virus checks and all that has got to add up to more than a few hundred bucks. The kinds of mistakes that are made transcribing information from machines that don't communicate with each other costs even more still. Clicking "I agree" is just priceless. > I've used 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP > extensively. My list is dos 3.2, windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT and 2000. My use peaked with 3.1 and fell off sharply with NT. I've used it at home, in small companies, large companies and state agencies. The performance has always been poor, regardless of staffing and support. Desktop machines had all of the above mentioned problems and "servers" would lose all of your information every year or so. By contrast, I can still boot up my old XT and read letters and email from 15 years ago. > They all have thier problems, but I > wouldn't call any of them "unusable". Now at times, after > being riddled with viruses or spyware, or just too > much software installed it gets to a point that it may be "unusable". > However, after a format/reinstall everything works like normal > again. You have your view of usable and I have mine. The less I use Microsoft, the fewer problems I have and the less tolerance I have for those problems when I see them. It's my opinion that system stability has steadily declined due to the registry and other broken windows computers on the network. More DRM will make things worse not better in the windows world. I expect the next version of windows to be the worst ever and it to make the networks even noisier and spam filled than ever. I was able to use 3.1, 95 and 98 to get things done but I refuse to waste any more time with the mess. I can't go back to insecure networking and the fragmented information isolated computers cause. I can't go back to a daily boot. I really wish someone had turned me onto emacs back in the late 80s, so I would not have wasted my time with Word Perfect. It was a waste then and it's a waste now. My view is tempered with several recent negative Windows experiences. Over the sumer, I had to set up a Windows 2000 box as a data acquisition device. It had been running windows 98 and was so virused up it would not boot from any of the three or four Microsoft CD I threw at it. It did boot off a Debian net install, knoppix, mepis and the Windows 2000 boot floppies which I used to shake out some of the deamons. You already know about the laptop. My most recent windows experience was watching a therapy machine crash. It's a great machine, but they made the mistake of using Microsoft for all 40 of it's control and calculation computers. A ray of sunshine came from talking with that machine's computer tech. He told me his company and all of the companies were moving toward "Unix", which is Solaris or Linux. The GE CT scan already uses Solaris and Linux and it has an excellent reputation. > > It's like saying that because I had my truck in the shop that > Dodges are unusable. Which is not true. Indeed that's not true.
