Re: XP is great

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 12:13:10 -0400, Mark Jones wrote:

> What the hell are you guys doing to corrupt your WinXP installs? I've
> heard bad
> reports about the SP2, but other than that XP is more stable and robust
> than 2K.
>
>
Agree completely. XP is the first microsoft OS I've actually trusted.
Versions with the old kernel, and the FAT32 file system, are simply too
likely to fail and take your file system with it. XP allows FAT32, but if
any of you are still running it, CONVERT NOW! You can easily convert to
NTFS, which is head and shoulders above FAT32, in terms of reliability.

Before I switched my kid's machine to NTFS, it would crash on a monthly
basis, and take the g-damned file system with it. That would mean a total
wipe/reinstall. When I decided to switch to NTFS, the system got much more
stable. It hasn't crashed since. (2 years ago...!) It runs constantly,
with lots of wierd downloads, kazaa lite, etc. My eldest daughter likes to
install whizzy graphical thingies. It is stable as a rock. The main
problem was spyware, but I've now got that under control.

> I have tried Mandrake and a few other 'nixes. The Matrix screensaver
> was cool,
> but I couldn't run most of the M$ power-apps on it like Proteus VSM or
> Sony Vegas Video and there is no comparible equivalent.

Linux is now sporting an app called 'wine', which allows many applications
to run. You can install a windows environment, and it'll run under linux.
Or, you can just install wine itself, and many applications (LTSpice, for
example) will run just fine. For the windows environment, however, it must
be a FAT32 formatted disk, since linux doesn't really like NTFS all that
much. The write support is unusable.

> If another OS
> existed which could do what Winblows can do or better, then I'd be
> interested. It sucks that M$ dominates the marketplace... but they don't
> HAVE to be dominating the marketplace - I don't see anyone else stepping
> up. That said, I'd love to code a new OS, knowing what we know now. The
> new 64-bit processors include many new registers, making software
> development a whole new ballgame. It is true that Windows OS's just keep
> getting bigger and more bloated. But it has to, to retain backwards
> compatibility. Eliminating that bottleneck alone, would be a
> revolutionary improvement. Of course, that means all new apps, and
> nobody would buy a new OS (even if it was the greatest on Earth) if no
> apps were made for it. Oh well.
>
>
People buy Mac OSX... however, they spent lots of money getting things to
work reliably in compatibility mode, which allowed users to keep using
their old apps. I believe that Mac OSX is the best OS out there, by far.
It's based on the mach microkernel and the BSD utility set, and has a
great object oriented graphical runtime environment. The only real issue
is that the Next guys Jobs hired decided that objective c would be a great
implementation language. Those Apple products always seem to have an
Achilles heel. It's because of their secret love of smalltalk, I think.

> -- "I can conceptualize what infinity is, but I cannot imagine it." MCJ
> 200406
.