Err...what's going on here then...

Hmm yeah I know, it has some nice additions, but they also filled it with rubbish and made it fat and slow. .in my experience of course.

Michael, the infrared thing does sound good, was it on 2000? If so I cant say thats an XP improvement, otherwise yeah it sounds like one of the additions which was nice.

XP running faster on a 266MHz machine than Win98? I am amazed, I have never seen it go faster. Microsoft recommend a much higher spec for XP than any other OS and I feel the only reason people think it is faster if because they are running it on faster machines! It does boot up faster though, which is important as it doesn't stay up very long. To put this in perspective, I have a linux computer that has been running for about 1 and a half years now without needing to be re-booted. that?s the server. I also have a Linux machine that is used every day and that has been on for about 5months now without needing a re-boot and I think I only did that last time to run a windows app. There is a XP machine that should stay on all the time, all it is used for is web browsing and playing music, films etc, but it gats restarted at least once a week because it crashes though admittedly it is a AMD using a Via chipset.

I feel XP is generally liked more than any other OS because they dumb it down. The less you have to know the more people like it, but I think they are now loosing people off the top end of the scale who want control back! I consider 'just getting the job done' doing what I tell it, when I tell it. Not doing what it thinks I probably want to do automatically. If I could run Cubase on Linux I would switch in a heart beat.

 

Regarding stability I can't even remember the last time a WinXP machine I was using crashed. I would suggest a hardware/compatability issue if you're having regular crashes with XP. Obviously Macs have less of those issues but that you can't blame XP for not taking into account the unique foibles of every possible Taiwanese motherboard and various CPUs/chipset combinations. IME Macs crash about as often as XP, which is not very often.

I don't know if the IR support was on Win2K - probably not. XP added much better and more intuitive support for all kinds of external devices (USB, IR etc).

Michael.

 

I too have found XP to be extremely stable. Clearly you just have some axe to grind or you've not set it up right (extremely likely given your comments regarding many things that, as Joel pointed out, can be turned off very easily). How many people other than me defrag windows as the first thing when installing it? After doing that I had an XP install run flawlessly for well over 2 years and I only stopped using it because I changed hard disk. The cardinal sin of XP is to try to run it on FAT32.

 

When using my last two machines (XP pro & XP home) I encountered the Blue Screen of death only twice in a good few years and both times the problem was hardware related. One time the cpu fan failed and the BSOD pointed me in the general direction of what was wrong and the second time the BSOD visited me was as a precursor to a hard disk failure. I do sometimes have a small number of applications fails from time to time (Firefox and DigiTV) but these I can put down to the application still being in the development phase or perhaps lack of drivers but I don't think these are due to a fault in the operating system as such. I do however feel patronized by the various help functions and some option defaults but as already stated most if not all of these can be changed by the user as required.

I feel that the various flavours of the Microsoft operating system do in fact meet the needs of a rather high percentage (80% 20% rule?) of the users world wide, that can't be all bad can it?

 

I do have an axe to grind; XP has wasted a lot of my time. With the computer that I mentioned running XP, as I said it is probably bad hardware causing a lot of the mess but I have seen it do stupid things on other systems as well.

What are your up-times on XP? Not that it is that easy to check on XP! If you have an XP machine that has been running and used every day for more than a month and showing no slowdowns or strangeness I would be surprised.

It's not to do with how I set it up, once I set it up I can remove most of the annoying things where XP is trying to be helpful but isn't, but I don't feel I should have to. Setting up an XP machine the other day, I turned the firewall off as the router has one. It then keeps warning me that it is off. I know, I forking did it!!! You have to set it to 'not monitored' which is very cleverly placed in a different section from the on and off options. It's mostly these things that bug me, obvious things they do so weirdly. Another example of this is when you try to do something your user doesn't have permission to do. It says you cant do that. Why not ask for the username and password of the person that can. I don't want to log off and on with the admin account to install or change settings, just ask me for my admin credentials. Not handling domain authentication correctly is really, really bad too. Try and find a application that can lock the whole computer up on Linux.. it will be hard. The fact an application in a Microsoft OS can lock the whole machine completely is a sign of bad, bad programming on the OS part. It should never give full control of the computer over to the app, everything the app does should go through the OS and as such the Os is in control and can kill the app at any time.

I could go on and on with all these little foibles. They are not much on their own but when they are all there at the same time..

I'm not saying you should use OSX, or Linux or anything I just don?t see how people can consider it a 'good' OS. It has the potential to be the best OS on the planet if they just made it work properly at the core, and IMO got rid of it trying to help all the time and just get in my way.

I know you think I am mad about getting even with XP or something and need to shut up, but hey, you keep replying! I have said my view now so I won't post about this anymore. Peace :MILD:

 

Did you know they removed the blue screen? In case of suc an error XP's default is to reboot without asking. You can of course turn this off and get a blue screen if you choose. Your 80-20% rule is a good point but I can't help feeling they are loosing that 20% off the top end of the scale with people who know what they are doing and gaining people who don't have a clue.

As I said, I wont comment on it anymore, but I just thought that blue screen thing was worth knowing!

 

I wont be drawn into your argument, but I would like to say this.

Open a command prompt, and type in "systeminfo" and thou shall receive the uptime

I've had XP machines on for a long time, without problem.

As for the dumbing down, well they have to do that dont they, to make it more accessible for those who, unlike yourself, clearly are not accomplished at using computers full stop.

But make no mistake, XP can still very well hack it as a tool for an experienced power user.

Its not perfect, but its a lot better than you make it out to be.

 

Okay thanks for the systeminfo thing I shall remember it.

 

No probs, very handy one for all manner of reasons.

 

Like I said tenson, over 2 years on a machine used pretty much every day. I suspect that it has a lot to do with my keeping things clean, tidy, and having diskeeper running (so it defrags when it thinks necessary... after those 2 years I had 11 fragmented files across 110GB of disks).

 

I have done quite a lot of development on an XP Pro/Visual Studio.NET setup, this was an old PIII, I found the system to be extremely stable and Microsoft's .NET is a really good development platform.

I am not a fan of Microsoft but I am a impressed with XP. I can't think of a better operating system I would rather use on my main PC anyway.

 

You mean 2 years up-time? It has not been shut down in 2 years.. that is impressive! You know the file system Linux uses just doesn't have a need for defragging? It doesn't exist.

 

Thats nice, but most people will find it daunting anyway, and it doesnt have the widespread support / appeal of XP.

 

No but I do think with the money and power Microsoft have they should implement such things themselfs.

 

No, not an uptime of 2 years.... although my father's had close to that on 2k. I meant the install was just fine 2 years later. I shut my machine down at night since there is no need whatsoever for it to be on then or during the day when I am at work. This saves around £200 per year in electricity also.

 

Does it really cost that much to keep it running? Even considering the power saving stuff like shutting off the monitor and slowing down the hard disks? I have, well my house has, 6 computers on 24/7! I think they use about 90watts each in sleepy mode.

 

Do you pay the electricity bill

 

No, thats why I am shocked it costs that much! I wonderd if he had taken into account the sleep mode stuff.

 

When you are the one paying the bills, you tend to take everything into account.

 

6x90 = 540W. Assume 6 hours per day in use, so 18 hours idling. 18 x 0.54 = 9.72kWh per day => 3500 kWh per year. At 8p per kWh that's £283.