Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 04, 2003 10:30 PM
I'll probably get flamed/banned for this, but...
I've been running XP Home for a bit more than 18months and I love it - mostly.
It's so stable, the only downtime I have had is when thunderstorms take out the power - that's pretty stable.
On the other hand, that stability can also be a liability - I recently goofed something up installing Mandrake, to the point that the only way to boot to ANY OS was to use the Mandrake Install CD and go to the rescue console. LILO, GRUB, bootfloppies, even my Windows Rescue CD(but only because I couldn't remember my Admin PW) didn't work.
Well, in this wretched state, I found that neither of our XP boxes had FDISK.EXE! For shame! Even better, try going to a command prompt in XP and type in "scandisk a:" - unless you've aliased that, it doesn't exist either(it's chkdsk now, and not documented in the help).
Still, XP is a great OS - it's not that much more swiss-cheesy than a _DEFAULT_ Linux install. Yeah, Windows has holes - in the state that most people run it, but if you run Linux in the same (DEFAULT) state that your average Windows user would, your main defense is obscurity.
Anyway, I got off topic, but the point is, I really like XP(for its stability over previous versions), I'm learning to love linux(because I'm a geek), but both OSes have some serious problems.
Linux for its relative "befuddlement" factor - sure, you linux geeks can set up a box for mom that's just as easy as WinXP/Mac, but what are the odds that she would be able to hit linux.org and find a distro that's both easy enough to set up and easy to use? Pretty low. And installing software is not near as easy as windows apps.
Windows problems are just the opposite - it's almost too easy to use, too forgiving of errors and too ready to set a default when the user doesn't know what (s)he's doing and not ready enough to explain what's going on. (Most users don't really care, they just want it to work, so defaults are good in that world.). Also, the disappearing FDISK and SCANDISK annoyed the heck out of me.
Dang, I rambled again. Somebody stop me before I start another paragraph. Tom
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Re:Hmm... more XP woe
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 04, 2003 10:30 PMI've been running XP Home for a bit more than 18months and I love it - mostly.
It's so stable, the only downtime I have had is when thunderstorms take out the power - that's pretty stable.
On the other hand, that stability can also be a liability - I recently goofed something up installing Mandrake, to the point that the only way to boot to ANY OS was to use the Mandrake Install CD and go to the rescue console.
LILO, GRUB, bootfloppies, even my Windows Rescue CD(but only because I couldn't remember my Admin PW) didn't work.
Well, in this wretched state, I found that neither of our XP boxes had FDISK.EXE! For shame! Even better, try going to a command prompt in XP and type in "scandisk a:" - unless you've aliased that, it doesn't exist either(it's chkdsk now, and not documented in the help).
Still, XP is a great OS - it's not that much more swiss-cheesy than a _DEFAULT_ Linux install. Yeah, Windows has holes - in the state that most people run it, but if you run Linux in the same (DEFAULT) state that your average Windows user would, your main defense is obscurity.
Anyway, I got off topic, but the point is, I really like XP(for its stability over previous versions), I'm learning to love linux(because I'm a geek), but both OSes have some serious problems.
Linux for its relative "befuddlement" factor - sure, you linux geeks can set up a box for mom that's just as easy as WinXP/Mac, but what are the odds that she would be able to hit linux.org and find a distro that's both easy enough to set up and easy to use? Pretty low. And installing software is not near as easy as windows apps.
Windows problems are just the opposite - it's almost too easy to use, too forgiving of errors and too ready to set a default when the user doesn't know what (s)he's doing and not ready enough to explain what's going on. (Most users don't really care, they just want it to work, so defaults are good in that world.). Also, the disappearing FDISK and SCANDISK annoyed the heck out of me.
Dang, I rambled again. Somebody stop me before I start another paragraph.
Tom
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