> The odd thing is that for the most part, I have yet to find a real > justification for the cash in terms of productivity that was not achieved > with the release of Windows 95 and its corresponding office suite. Windows > 98 and 2K have achieved little more than an incremental resistance to crashes > and have driven many upgrades and redos in the office in order to keep things > moving.
The argument that windows crashes often is no longer a valid argument. Win95 crashed often. Win98 crashed less often, but ate your disk more often. However, winNT/2000/XP don't crash when configured properly. Win2000 was the first usable system of these. My first windows 2000 system went well over a year without a single crash. Then I upgraded my motherboard and all periferals, and reinstalled win2000. Its been a couple of months, and still no crashes. You could make an argument about memory leaks, or that windows isn't good for servers, but aside from cost issues, linux doesn't really compete for the desktop. My linux applications used to mysteriously disapear all the time. Now that KDE has a crash dialog, I'm pretty familiar with that too. Now of course I'm sure I could use dated versions of KDE, and a 2.2 kernel, and maybe it'd be more stable. But I think its highly ironic that people talk about windows desktops crashing, considering my experiences. Now of course linux makes a better server. Win2k servers are a joke. But as long as you turn you at least reboot your windows desktop once a day (which doesn't seem like too much to ask), it does a great job. -Eric Hattemer
