Re: Why I am Still Using Windows

From: imotgm (imotgm_REMOVE_at_invalid-yahoo.com)
Date: 08/07/04 

Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2004 06:29:10 GMT

On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 21:27:48 +0000, Charlie wrote:

 
> I love Linux and support it totally, but seriously, if your problems were
> that bad with Windows, there was something radically wrong with your set
> up.
> I am assuming you are talking Windows 2000 or better.
> If Win9X, excuse my intrusion and I agree with you.
> If WinME, where can I buy you a beer :)

Assume Win98SE and Win2k. Both are still on this computer, along with, at
present, 9 Linux distros. Surprise, surprise, Win98SE is more stable on
this machine than Win2K. With the exact same hardware, obviously, all of
the Linux installations are rock solid, with no shut downs necessary,
except to switch kernels, or to a different distro. I've had uptimes into
months when I'm not playing between distros. If the problems with Windows
were hardware related, the same "defects" should show up somehow with
Linux, yet they do not.

[For Win2K]

Things in the registry regularly vanish, for no apparent reason, and I
have to go in and manually change them back, and make a backup .reg file
that I can run the next time it happens, and it always does; separate
files for different trees in the registry, only the smallest part to fix
the problem. We're talking things like mount points, where drives suddenly
disappear, but reappear after running mount.reg maybe two or three times a
week. Get everything running right, and make a backup, Install to a new
drive, just to make sure, and then run the backup to get back the entire
installation. Same problems on the new drive, so not a failing drive, did
that three times with drives from different manufacturers, to eliminate
that possibility. Different memory sticks, matched and mismatched, makes
no difference. Re-cabled at least a dozen times. Every 4-6 months, I take a
day, and tear the computer down completely, and clean all the contacts,
clean and lubricate the fans, redo the heat transfer media between the CPU
and heat sink, and re-cable with fresh new cables. Put back together, and
run the memtest overnight.

My desktop has a file cabinet directory, with icon to match, with A-Z
folders inside, and at least 100 .reg files in them for recurring registry
flops. I don't make a .reg file unless the same problem happens at least
three times. The number of one time oops to the registry is uncountable,
as is the number of times I've had to run the repair setup program when it
just goes into an endless loop of "One of the disks must be checked for
errors" check for errors, find some, or not, get to loading the desktop,
and spontaneously reboot, then "You" didn't shut down properly last time;
Hell, I didn't shut down at all, Windows does it on its own, no warning,
no error message.

After 15-20 of these loops, run the repair, get half way through, and get
"one of the install files didn't copy correctly, start over". What's with
copying the install files that are already on the hard drive in the i386
directory, a second time, each time the repair app is run? Why not read
them directly from that directory, and install them, like Win98 does? I
got a good clean copy of the files, and copied the "boot.ini" that has the
extra stanza for setup, and just copy that over the regular boot.ini when
I want to run the setup/repair app, and just reboot. It then thinks it did
the copying, fresh, and goes on with the repair, without doing the disk
check, again, and the copying of the files, again. I don't ever see the
"file didn't copy correctly" error anymore.

If I boot it every day, and turn it off at night, it will settle down and
run relatively like a real computer, not a good one, mind you, but you
could get some real work done, between the virus scans and the defrags and
the lost clusters when a running program suddenly brings the whole thing
down, while trying to save a large file, and the famous cross-linked files,
of course. It will usually boot on the first, or second, try. If I don't
boot it for a month or two, that boot may bring any, or all of the above,
and I look forward to it with all the joy of a sharp stick in the eye.

There are only two reasons I have, and keep it; when it's running,
resource hungry apps do not freeze up for lack of resources, like Win98
does, and I got it FREE from Microsoft, when I attended a seminar, as an
unpaid for guest, and they handed them out to everyone in the room. I'd be
more than pissed, if I'd actually paid for this POS. :-)

I only use it, now, when fixing someone else's machine, as a source of
files, and when digging out some old documents, which thankfully happens
rarely, and becomes less and less likely, as time goes by. It's in a
removable drive bay, and can be left out of the machine, except for the
rare occasion when it's used. I have an entry in grub for it, and can
still boot it from either the hdc or hde drive slot, without removing my
main drives.

>> I moved to Linux, and found easy to find, user readable, easy to
>> edit, individual config files, I damn near wet my pants, with pure joy.
>> ;-P
>
> Well, I didn't wet my panties, but I agree with you here.
> It's nice to at least stand a chance toward fixing some problem.

Linux is a pure joy to work with, and on, compared to Windows, any flavor.
I've never had a problem I couldn't fix, and never had to reinstall any
Linux ever, since my first Mandrake 6.0, and Suse 6.4. Individual apps
that were broken, and needed a newer fixed version, sure, no problem. The
whole shebang, never, not a chance. The first install always has either
been uneventful, or at least gotten enough installed that adding apps, and
working with configs, ended up giving me the installation I originally
intended to have. The original Suse 6.4 ran along side of 7.2, and 8.0,
and only got removed to make room for 8.1. The last three ran along side
of 8.2 and 9.1 before I finally removed them, to make room for other
distros I was curious about.

Windows was always work, and anger, trying to make it live up to the
promises Billy Boy made, and never quite achievable. Linux is my
pleasure. ;-D 

-- 
imotgm

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