Jeremy Taffel wrote:
My experiences with XP are mixed. Normally I have no problems whatsoever...
All I was trying to say is that when it comes to PCs, the hardware is so variable that I really don't think you read across OS experiences from one to another. My most stable machine runs windows 95! I wouldn't claim though that win95 is more stable than 98 or XP, just that it suits that particular setup. I have one windows98 machine which is mainly very reliable, and another (with more memory) which crashes through memory leaks. I have had good and bad experiences with XP. I have had Linux Mandrake 10.0 work perfectly on several PCs, and make a complete pig's ear of hardware detection on another It took me about an hour to set up one hybrid wired/wireless network on 4 PCs with a shared broadband connection (2 XP one 98se, one 95), and about 30hrs and several sets of hardware to set up another similar network of 3 PCs (one XP, one 98se/linux, one ME).
Despite all these problems, given the insanely low cost of PC hardware, I can't see any QL hardware development going anywhere. Not that I want to discourage anyone from developing hardware, but I see it essentially as a hobby with a very limited potential user base, and little prospect of paying for its development time.
This puts me firmly into the emulation camp.One advantage of emulation is that I don't have such a great printer issue. All I need is the ability to store the data in a form where I can load it into native OS applications for printing (on my USB printer). For much of my needs, it is adequate to take screen shots of superbasic windows and cut and paste them into grown-up applications such as open-office.
I'd be interested to know what the final split is in Tony's/Quanta's survey between more traditional hardware and the emulators. I haven't filled it in yet myself - I started, but then got frustrated and gave up - as an ex-Quanta member I feel that I should be able to fill in the Quanta related questions. Isn't anyone interested in why people leave, and what could be done to get them to rejoin?
(now I've joined about 4 threads)
Jeremy
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