Windows woes

[pragma]

In article <e0e770$21p$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, John C says...
>
>"pragma" <pragma_member at pathlink.com> wrote in message 
>news:e0e546$30mt$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>> In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>>>
>> [huge snip]
>>
>>>There, I feel better now <g>.
>>>
>>
>> I feel your pain Walter.
>>
>> I knew something was fundamentally wrong with Windows when I once told a 
>> friend
>> that my (former) windows 98 installation was up and running (and under 
>> heavy
>> use) for over 3 years.  His face was aghast as he quipped "how the hell 
>> did you
>> do *that*?"
>>
>> "Blood, sweat and many tears", I replied.
>>
>> - EricAnderton at yahoo
>
>Poor Windows. It does take some stick. Shall I be the only one to come to 
>its defence and say I've never had so much as a crash since Windows 2000? 
>Honestly, all this fuss... 

Oh, don't get me wrong.  If there's one thing that Windows does well, it manages
to wrangle an absolutely *huge* hardware compatibility listing.  Throw in on top
of that the mind-boggling size of the matrix created by drivers, hardware,
patches hotfixes and locales, and its a wonder that it doesn't blow up more
often than it does.

BTW, I hope to come back to it all by running XP in a vmware environment when I
get the chance.  I still need a flexible test platform after all. :)

My major contention with Windows is that it lacks a good failure mode for a lot
of stuff that linux/unix users take for granted.  If you happen to touch on a
bad combination of the facets mentioned above, you don't boot at all, or get a
pretty blue-screen when you least expect it - Safe Mode doesn't always get you
back out that mess.

Also, linux is not without its warts too.  I'm having a hell of a time trying to
get it to support Nforce3 from a floppy install - AFAIK, it can't be done w/o
some serious hacking or using a CD instead.

- EricAnderton at yahoo