Is there a stable version of Windows? 2

[miner00]

At work, I run Windows NT and to this point, I have had no problems. My computer at home though runs Windows ME, I have had nothing but trouble. To this point, it has corrupted several programs that now need to be reinstalled and dies if I try to extrude a solid in Solidworks. Lately it has been freaking out with Word docs.

I am about ready to go out and buy Windows XP, but I thought I would ask around to see if there was a better option. This is a relatively new computer with a P3 933mHz and 128MB Ram. I will probably upgrade RAM as well, but 128 should be more than enough to run Word or extrude a solid without dying.

 

[beercia]

NevarMaor:

For what I see your XP machines are behaving very much the same as my Win 98 machine is ( keeping the distance, of course, in software improvements and applications run). I think that if software manufacturers were somewhat more transparent on their products it would be a lot easier for the user to find the cause of these problems. Or maybe they don't want you to find out?

 

[Focht3]

Which was first - the chicken or the egg? Since all Apple motherboards are made by Apple, and the BIOS is crafted solely by Apple to Apple's specs, I prefer to think of it as Apple simply decided to limit the number of motherboard designs they would support because - well, they could.



Please see FAQ731-376 by [blue]VPL[/blue] for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

 

[IRstuff]

Don't forget, Apple actually did license their technology to 2nd sourcers about 10 years ago, but I think the fees were so stiff that 2nd sourcers were unable to effectively compete.

TTFN

 

[Focht3]

Yup - the same mistake that Sony made with the Beta format. Short sighted, if you ask me -



Please see FAQ731-376 by [blue]VPL[/blue] for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

 

[IRstuff]

I think most people have forgotten or have got it too easy to remember why it's a good thing to have the MS monopoly on OS's.

When I bought my first 286 in 1980's, there were easily 8 different operating systems and an equal number of equivalent office software suites. The odds of getting:
> OS and software to be compatible
> your file and someone else to be compatible

was close to ZERO.

Not only that, since everyone was off on a different software, you could never find anyone with the same problem, either to fix it or to lament it.

Nowadays, everyone uses Office and Windoze, which means that everyone can help everyone else, because everyone has the same set of problems. Files and jumpdrives can be swapped wily-nily. Think how hard it was to get Zip drives to behave on different systems.



TTFN

 

[beercia]

The idea of having one single source for your OS seems great if only the OS manufacturer behaves transparently and very strightforward in their support of their environment for developers of third party software. But the thing here has been a very predatory MS on everybody that dared to create a new application that in some way would complement Windows or any of the MS products (a typical I win-you loose situation for other developers). MS has in a way made the whole home computing business a real mess for us the users filling it with poorly finished products (of which Windows is one of the best examples, otherwise Linux wouldn't be needed or even would have been created) being more interested in bringing out still more poorly finished upgrades or editions for money's sake rather than customer satisfaction. My, could any company be so blind? Let's hope Google doesn't bite the MS hook for the sake of all the users like me that find it extremely useful. As long as MS keep having deaf ears to their customer feedback on their products then we'll see Linux and other would be OS blooming in the future. And in the middle of everything? We the customers that depend on a poorly finished OS product with no right whatsoever of complaining to anyone (It's only a license to use). I guess MS qualitywise should learn from Intel.

 

[unclesyd]

Just heard on the news that Microsoft isn't going to support any Win 98 products come January even though 20% of the computers still run 98 OS.

 

[beercia]

Has there been REALLY any time that Microsoft has ever given appropiate support to ANY version of Windows? Lack of support for Windows 98 from MS probably will go unnoticed except for third party dwindling available software applications that will make use of it.

 

[IRstuff]

And which of you is willing to invest money to support a 6yr old product?

The anti-MS champion Sun Microsystems was never shy about that with their own workstation products. In fact, Sun went out of its way to ensure the lack of forward and backward compatibility on many of their products.

TTFN

 

[beercia]

Microsoft has never in the life of Windows 98 given any decent software support (and neither for other software products as well). Basically all they have done is publish patches to mend all the loopholes and bad programming embedded in their products. Of course, they are really happy publishing "new Windows versions that will fix and improve security and reduce virus attacks", just to keep the money flowing (Milking the cow so to speak). But we the customers, that pay dearly for their products, are left pretty much on our own to solve all the problems that they didn't properly address at the time of making the "new" Windows version. The least we would expect from any manufacturer is decent support of their products just to keep the customer happy and reduce the stress of having to deal with a poorly finished product, no matter how old it may be (if it were well finished they probably wouldn't need to address problems on old software except bringing it up to date, i.e. remember MSDOS). But again, MSDOS was not a true Microsoft product, was somebody else's brainchild. May be that's why.

 

[IRstuff]

That's hardly a meaningful comparison.

MSDOS consisted of a core, that was less than 200kB, along with over 100 application programs that were completely separate from the operating system. All told, there was barely 10MB of executable code, compared to nearly 1GB for current OS's.

And lest anyone think that MSDOS was problem free, don't forget that MSDOS went through SIX major revisions, and most users wouldn't even attempt to go back to anything before MSDOS3.3

MSDOS started out with ZERO support for EMM, ZERO support for hard disks, ZERO support for multitasking, ZERO support for TSR's, ZERO support for any sort of windowed user interface, ZERO support for networking, ZERO support for any peripherals whatsoever.

Apparently, you've all forgotten how difficult it was to get different applications to play nicely with DOS, EMM, and it various TSR's. I distinctly remember having 4 or 5 different config.sys and autoexec.bat sets for different applications. MSDOS5.0 was the first version that allowed you to reconfigure at bootup, so all the different config.sys versions were in one file.



TTFN

 

[Focht3]

I sometimes "pine" for the days of MS-DOS. But not often. I still have my 1984 Compaq luggable running MS DOS 6.2, so I have something to remind me what "the good old days" were really like. NO THANKS. Yes, WIN98 has a lot of flaws, but they can be dealt with and kept pretty stable if you know what you were doing. (I call no BSODs in almost a year pretty damn stable.) And WIN98 is six years old - time to chunk the old OS and get a new one. Anyone still running Windows 98 on a 60 MHz Pentium with 16 Mb of RAM? I doubt it. So what's the big deal? Since when in the last 30 years has any OS been supported for more than about 6 years, anyway?

Yes, there are lots of security holes in Windows (all flavors.) But the same goes for OS X, Linux, Solaris, BeOS, etc., etc., etc. It's just that those other flavors involve damn few machines, so very few are interested in exploiting them. I assure you that OS X - and every other Apple OS - would have been successfully exploited had Apple owned 90% of the PC marketplace.

And don't get too wistful about DOS. I ran one of the original IBM PCs with IBM PC-DOS 1.0 (Microsoft OS with IBM label and a few tweaks.) IT REALLY SUCKED! That's how I got it - my boss was used to TRS-80's from Radio Shack; he was disgusted with how rudimentary the damn things were (hardware and software) - for $5,000 apiece. He's Cajun, and tends to swear a lot when he gets mad. He was very mad that Monday morning....

Anybody still running a TRS-80 for business? What OS? When was it patched last?



Please see FAQ731-376 by [blue]VPL[/blue] for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

 

[IRstuff]

If you REALLY want to get wistful, there's good ole CPM-80, running on a 4MHz Z-80 with dual 186K floppies and only 64K RAM.

The only saving grace was that if you had a couple of good tools, you could patch the OS, at will, by yourself. Plus, there were plenty of people trying to do exactly the same thing, so there was plenty of support, although not from Digital Research.



TTFN

 

[unclesyd]

IRstuff,
Got one of them plus 2 TI 99-4As' tape drive memory 16K ram mem 8 + 8 running on Ti basic with the Chicklet keyboard. Never could do much except play games.
As I've mentioned before the IBM mainframe I started on had to be hand wired for each program and data input with punched cards. The input data sheets for the keypunch operators had to have all the blanks filled with O's leading and trailing.
You certainly didn't want to ask one the fellows in the blue suits anything about the machine. They would work on the innards but service stopped at the keyboard.
I made that mistake.

 

[GregLocock]

I still use a Toshiba Libretto running Windows 95.

I wouldn't say that it NEVER crashes, but it is not too bad at all- certainly no worse, and probably better, than a Mac of the same vintage (7.5, I had several and they crashed once every two hours just like Win 3.11), and since Linux didn't have a graphical desktop then it wasn't even in contention.

I find Microsoft bashing rather silly. They are a big company operating very succesfully. We, the consumers, have aided and abetted their monopolistic position.



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[IRstuff]

The point, though, is that certain things require a monopoly. Consider the aforementioned days of DOS, when there were at least 4 windowed user interfaces, ala, DR DOS, Windows 1.0, etc. They were all different, and incompatible with each other. You had ZERO assurance that anyone else in the universe would be able to read a file or document created on a particular machine. Documents and data had to be transferred as ASCII text to be sure of any compatibility whatsoever.

Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Acrobat are all lingua franca BECAUSE there is a standard, unliked though it might be.

This is not unlike the days when every railroad company had a different track gauge until railroad monopolies were able to standardize track gauges and make it possible to ship things transcontinental without changing railroad cars.

TTFN

 

[NevarMaor]

Geez, TRS-80 now that brings back memories ... high school Basic programming ... my god I'm getting old

I remember using a Vic20 with 3k free RAM

Have somewhat stabilized Win XP (I stress SOMEWHAT) - sems the "new" webclient service had a lot to do with problems we were expeiencing (as well as the Win XP tooltip bug that they have a fix for but you have to jump through hoops to get). Disabled the webclient. Still think Win 2000 pro was more stable. Have basically disabled all the "new " enhancements in Xp and it even looks like Win 2000 now. But I can now get through most (well, more than half) days without crashing.

FYI Computer is:
Dell 3.06Ghz P4
1Gb RAM
SCSI 30Gb HD
Fire GL (don't remember specifics) 64Mb Video
ummm, trackball (hate mice)

Also helped to set the swap file as fixed rather than windows-managed. Set as 2Gb (and even with 1Gb RAM I have entered the swap zone)

Of course at home (where I'm typing now) I have to be different - FreeBSD. Only thing it won't do is run Solid Edge that I use at work.

 

[beercia]

I do agree with you that some things require a monopoly and in the case of computer OS systems I do agree with you also. But the thing here is that whomever the monopoly might be in something like OS systems, the least that we could expect as customers from this monopoly, is a well finished and well maintained product with appropiate customer service and support, whenever is needed to solve minor problems and adjustments that may occur (not the type that Microsoft has accustomed us to expect today). Were MS Windows all the minimum things that we customers expect it to be (stability, security, top notch customer support, openness, freedom of choice for add-ons without having an MS-third party software vendor war develop on your computer, etc) there wouldn't be any need for third party alternative OS systems. And above all, no matter how big and great a company like MS might be, I, as a customer, have the right to spell it out on the things that I as customer dislike on a product that, like Windows, makes the commercial world go around, without having to be called a basher just for saying what I don't like on any product that I paid for and as such I expect decent performance from. This being said, I have some questions: Is Windows all you guys dreamed of as an OS? Does Windows gives you trouble free operation all the time? Is your Windows platform stable and safe as an OS so you can entrust all your greatest secrets to your computer without somebody else knowing about it? Can you operate your computer free of interference from third parties while on line? Can you say with a 100% certaintity that you are 90% satisfied with the way Windows (in all its versions) behaves and handles its job? Does Microsoft gives free advice to solve all the problems that Windows have due to their lack of quality control? If all your answers to these questions are yes then you're have just said a white lie ( as a matter of fact, if you answer just two with a yes you are probably telling a lie also).

 

[IRstuff]

But, you (the royal one) also expect all this for a $1.98 ;-).

It hasn't been possible since the mid-80's to even come close to fully testing every possible combination of user/hardware/application/attack interaction.

Your questions are somewhat rhetorical, since I don't believe that anyone can or has come up with fool-proof, bulletproof, and tamper-proof ANYTHING. That's independent of monopoly issues.

Most user seem to think, that there some non-infinite approach to testing software, there isn't and again, hasn't been since the mid-80's, when software had only thousands of lines of code. Human programmers write and humans test. They can't foresee all the possibilities, nor can we even begin test all the possibe ways software can be run or attacked.

A good example is the DES encryption standard. Ignoring conspiracy question, the DES was thought to be extremely safe 20 yrs ago, because hardware was not fast enough, nor was there algorithm to break the factorization problem. We now know better, and the DES was relatively simple from a complexity perspective.

I've worked on the development of small 16-bit microprocessors, which were absurdly simple by today's standards, but we were never able to fully simulate, much less test, the product to identify all the possible defects. Many defects were and are data dependent. We had problem that took us nearly 3 yrs to get to solve, partly due to other priorities and partly due to complexity.

My point is that you shouldn't trust your prized possession to anyone, if you can avoid it. Run your taxes and then put the data on a CD and lock in a firesafe. Don't store your passwords on your computer, don't store anything worth anything on any computer with access to the internet.


TTFN

 

[GregLocock]

beercia opined: "the least that we could expect as customers from this monopoly, is a well finished and well maintained product with appropiate customer service and support, whenever is needed to solve minor problems and adjustments that may occur "

Not at all. The /most/ you can /expect/ from a monopoly is a product that is just good enough to prevent an alternative from springing up.

To be honest I disagree with you - Windows 2000 is rock solid in my experience. In the last year and a half I have had no viruses, no downtime (other than from a flaky memory chip) and no device driver problems. You sound like an open source zealot (which is fine) and if you are then I can tell you that Linux has a LONG way to go before it is ready for the general corporate desktop.

Maybe after IBM has had a couple of years experience with it there might be good distro around, and the main faults in OO may be fixed, but you should bear in mind that IBM are not doing this because they love Linux, they are doing it for business reasons.

Anyway, this debate seems to be wandering into /. territory, rather than engineering.






Cheers

Greg Locock