I’ve used XP home and Pro on several machines for well over a year now and thrown all sorts of funkiness at them. There is usually some major pooch screwing that needs to be happening before XP will crash, and if it does it usually recovers gracefully so long as there is not some hardware defect causing the problem
On my girlfriend’s XP box, actual crashes are very rare, but I’ve watched it get weirder and weirder by the day until she shrieks with outraged annoyance and reboots. Weirdnesses consist of things like screen artifacts from formerly opened programs, programs that won’t maximize from the task bar when you click on them, spontaneously self-closing document windows, disappearing cursor arrows, intermittent unresponsive pauses where nothing happens when you type and then it catches up a moment later (sometimes missing some characters), programs that won’t launch, printer drivers that give errors instead of successfully printing (especially Acrobat Distiller), removable disks that continue to show the content of previous disks after swapping them for another and then report errors if you try to copy to them, blocks of text scrolling up out of the MS Word windows and up into the menu and buttonbar area, blocks of Word text that won’t let you click into them or highlight them to make changes, sudden disappearances of huge chunks of text (requiring a Save As to avoid overwriting the original and then doing comparison and copy-paste to create something useful after a reboot)…
She hates to reboot and rarely closes an application and instead leaves it running full time. The weirdnesses start showing up anywhere from 3rd day onwards. She’ll usually have IE, Word, Excel, Lotus 123, Lotus WordPro, Eudora, Acrobat Reader, and FileMaker Pro open, each with several open documents or windows. I’ve heard other PC users express astonishment that she runs that many apps concurrently. (There are also a half-dozen shareware background processes running including FileBox Extender and QuickKeys)
MacOS X is less likely to get wonky over time but more likely for its various applications to crash on you (“The application AppName has unexpectedly quit; the operating system remains unaffected”) so that you lose your work and cuss but it doesn’t get worse with time. Some apps are definitely more fragile than others. FileMaker is rather pathetic on X, which is a major disappointment for me since I’m a FileMaker developer, so I’m mostly still on 9.
Under 9, you can have a zillion programs open and be working away with no problems, and on good days it stays that way until the end of the day and you shut down. On not-so-good days, you get an application crash or you force-quit it and then notice things getting wonky and unresponsive and weird and if you have any common sense you save any unsaved work and reboot because it’s only gonna get worse and it will generally not take long to do so. On downright bad days, the application crash pulls down the whole OS and any unsaved work is toast right then and there. That’s the weakness of an OS without protected memory. On the other hand, I actually run as many apps as my girlfriend does under XP, often having FileMaker, Eudora, Photoshop, Acrobat, BBEdit, iCab, NetFinder, Excel, and Script Editor open, plus VirtualPC running NT Server and within that environment FmPro for Windows and Netscape or IE, and that’s with about 4 dozen 3rd party shareware control panels and extensions patching the system to the way I like it to look and feel and run. While I can’t say it’s as stable as XP it’s quite robust, far far more so than conventional wisdom says it would be. (for instance, most people would assume Windows98 or '95 would be more stable than MacOS 9, but most Win95/98/ME users I know wouldn’t dare launch that many programs for simultaneous use, and many of them wouldn’t even dare install more than nine or ten total). The thing with 9 is it’s fast and responsive and smooth and does exactly what you want it to do, kind of like a nice little hotrod sportycar convertible on the freeway, it’s a good vehicle unless there’s a collision. Both MacOS X and XP are tanks in comparison. Sometimes they feel huge and lumbering (read my recent thread on getting sendmail to work as an SMTP server for other computers in my environment) and they can be hard to steer (XP getting it into its head that the device at such-and-such a logical location has the following wrong characteristic, good god)but they sure ain’t fragile.
Shugart Associates invented SCSI, by the way. Apple was the first to use a lot of things in mass-market hardware, but has rarely invented any of it.
The computer mouse was invented in 1964 by Douglas Engelbart, who was working in his own research lab, Augmentation Research Center, at Stanford Research Institute. He filed for a patent in 1967.
I’d reinstalled Windows every couple of months for years until I got XP installed. I think I may only have reinstalled it a single time. However a few months ago I gave that computer to my brother, who brought it my house last night with a really, really screwed XP installation. It’d’ve probably been perfect had he not abused it. It was loaded with spyware and virii and all sorts of other nasties that he’d aquired on the internet. Of course, the easiest, cleaning solution is to wipe the drive and do a clean install (which I’ll do for him later tonight). It was a testament to the stability of Windows XP (and I’m a Windows-hater, remember) that it took me forever to get the dang XP disk to boot. It’d been so long that I hadn’t done a reinstall that I didn’t realize I had the CD burner jumpered as a slave but connected as a master and the BIOS just wouldn’t see it (always worked in Windows, though) (had removed one of the hard drives when I gave it to him).