My XP SP3 installed flawlessly on my 5 year old Sony Vaio. That doesn’t mean I like Windows. While on vacation in California, I tried to download a Excel spreadsheet via Windows Vista and a web-base Lotus Notes. After 45 minutes of screwing around, I gave up. I used XP system later–no problem. My nickname for Vista is “Ballmer’s Curse” --perhaps he’ll throw a chair in his office in my honor if he reads this post.
Oh, did I mention it took me two days (and 12 hours of HP tech support) to get my HP L7650 printer to work in at least a primitive fashion? The installer seemed to have suffered a case of dereliction of duty; it was finally solved by manually installing the correct drivers into the c:/windows/inf directly. My moniker for XP is “Ballmer’s Last Chance at Redemption”. Note the progression of the nicknames.
If your ever in my office, Mr. Ballmer, I’ll throw a chair across the room in your honor.
Yeah, right. Red Hat never could figure out my (totally generic and common) sound card, and Ubuntu bricked my laptop.
Linux is a fucking joke – it’s for people who want to fiddle with their OS more than people using Windows, and then feel smug because they’ve made their weird software somehow work with actual data sometimes.
Frankly, all the OS’s suck, because they’re all just patch-upon-patch-upon-patch. It’s time for a new OS, something designed from scratch.
As soon as I saw the SP3 patch, I knew to avoid it, for the same reason I’m avoiding Vista. If it’s from Microsoft, it’ll be full of bugs. Best to let them work those out for a year or so.
That used to be the case, half a decade ago or more. There are a number of very usable Linux desktop distributions now, that require far less fiddling than Windows. If your experience has been otherwise, you’ve just been unlucky.
Call me Mr. Unlucky, then. Linux sux as bad as all the other OS’s. The fact that we’re discussing this is proof of that. An OS should be transparent, simple, and flawless. Anything else is an insult to the users.
I think that’s actually the fallacy of the excluded middle, rather than proof of anything in particular - you’re not admitting any reasonable middle ground between perfection and ‘sux’. If that were the case, nearly, if not all of the works of man are in the ‘sux’ category then. Nothing we do is ever perfect all of the time.
That’s never going to happen. The curse of the PC marketplace is that there is an almost infinite number of combinations of hardware and firmware. Not even the CPU chips are perfect. Every CPU produced has an errata sheet, which is a very long list of all the things that are broken or can fail under certain circumstances. The same is true of other complex chips used in PCs. Microsoft certainly deserves their share of the blame, but they have set themselves an impossible task. One of Apple’s major advantages is that they have control over the hardware that people use to run their operating system. Even then, they make mistakes and sometimes certain features don’t work on some models of their computers.
Why is the concept that a computer is manufactured by people who should understand the computer that they manufactured, and the operating system would reflect the level of knowledge one would expect of the engineering talent that built the hardware?
It’s an operating system. It should operate the device upon which it is installed, and accomplish the tasks for which that device was built. Is that entirely unreasonable? My various “upgrades” never ask if I have altered the basic configuration of my computer. They just say that the upgrade is needed for yadda yadda. So, when that happens to my car, it’s called a “Recall” and the company has to pay for it, and make sure it is installed correctly.
Why don’t consumers . . . oh, never mind. In the modern world consumers only spend.
After all of the above, I’m doing my best to hold off until SP3 has been out there for a while. But MS Update is telling me I need a security update (KB950749) due to some vulnerability in MSJet40.dll. But every time I try and get it, it fails. Grrrr! I’ve trid in Safe mode, without my firewall, while standing on my head…nothing! In other times I’ve bypassed the headache and downloaded the patch directly, but damned if I can find a direct link to it.
I have no idea if this is some nefarious ploy by MS to get me to install SP 3, but it sure feels that way! And hey, who needs rationality when you can blame someone for your troubles.
I went to buy a laptop early in 2007. I was pretty annoyed with the Mac price right from the start. PCs let you take them home before they start annoying you.
I ended up getting just as nice a computer, plus a 3 year extended warranty with accident insurance for $200 less then equivalent mac laptop price.
Plus it has an SSE 2 instruction set so if I ever wanna run OSX (and somehow have money to blow) I can buy a copy then use the compatibility patch on it anyway.
I think I was fairly good at using Windows before making the switch. I did only have nine years experience in the Windows server and dektop arena, including a national infrastrucutre manager positon at the time of my departure from IT.
BUT, I get what you are saying. Many of the complaints about Windows can be easily readied, and the Mac way of doing updates is not perfect. On the whole, the Mac update system is far and away better than the Windows.
My love for the Mac stems from an understanding of what is supposed to be. Macs are an appliance, sure you can customize and mess witht the stuff under the hood but most people just use it and walk away. Windows is the end result of the Microsoft need to be all things to all people.