I have run my computer with Win95 for months at a time. I have a friend at school who moved into the dorms and did not turn his off for about half a year with no problems. I think many of the "problems" with Windows are propaganda againts the guy on top. If it is such an inferior product, how come no one can seem to bring it down, even when they are offering their OS for free? ------------------ "Of course, thats just my opinion, I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller
Merely having an OS that runs for a long time is not really much of a selling point. I could write an OS that would run for 6 months without crashing, it just wouldn't do anything... ------------------ Give me ambiguity or give me something else. Sign up for season 2 of the CC.net NBA Sim League! http://bbs.clutchcity.net/ubb/Forum12/HTML/000328.html
Well, I'm gonna say this about Windows . . . a lot of people use it. But it does have its problems. If you don't use it very often, or with many large programs then it is stable . . . or at least stable enough. But Windows has its little quirks too . . . as a tech, most of the problems we got were software. And plenty of them were caused by Windows. Windows problems are a bit overexaggerated, but not THAT much. I've had some really weird problems with it before, and WinME is no exception. That little "autorecovery" thing can be a real crock when it won't start up properly in the first place. ------------------ "Up and down, inside out, outside in, some you lose some you win" -- DMB -> "Sweet Up and Down"
There was a bug in Win95/98 that caused it to stop responding after 49+ days of continuous operation. Very few people cared because no one who needed uptime and security would be running Windows 95/98 to begin with. We had a QA test lab that actually tried this, and yes, it does happen. Check out the Microsoft knowledge base : Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days If you're running anything remotely requiring continuous uptime, you'd at least run NT. You say that you've run you computer with Win95 for months at a time. What does that mean? I've run it for months at a time, too, but had it crash about 3-4 times a week. If you install and uninstall software regularly, the Windows registry becomes so bloated it takes forever to boot up and/or causes registry corruption. I made it a habit to re-install Windows every 6 months. The average user that just does email, maybe surfs, and keeps track of finances may not experience many of the problems (although even that's difficult to believe). I believe at one point Microsoft was touting that Windows 98 fixed thousands of Windows 95 bugs. And this is supposed to reassure the public? I'll see if I can find the quote on the number of fixes. ------------------ My company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then agreed to merge with another company, which also declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... should I be worried?
Maybe not to us the individual users, but ask companies running mission-critical servers and to ISP's running hosting services that brag about their "99.9% uptime". Their entire business revolves around uptime. Another way to look at it : I've often seen deals on the 'Net that I tried to purchase only to see a constant spinning globe in my IE window. It never connected. I clicked the stop button and just purchased the product elsewhere. They lost a sale. Orrrr... you're trying to execute a trade through your online broker only to not be able to connect. The servers have either crashed or cannot handle the load. This happened several times last year to companies such as Datek and Ameritrade. Irate customers aren't a good thing. ------------------ My company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then agreed to merge with another company, which also declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... should I be worried?
That's the funny part. Microsoft is the propoganda machine. Sure the Unix geeks and Mac Freaks all have their quirks, too. But Microsoft is the marketing magnate in the PC world. OS's such as OS/2 have been put out of commission because Microsoft's propoganda and marketing was better than IBM wanted to compete against. Yet many consider OS/2 to be a far superior OS than anything Microsoft has put out to-date. If you follow the BugTraq mailing list and security lists, you'll see how insecure an operating system Windows 95/98 is. They had a password protection scheme on it that let everybody think they were safe from unwanted break-ins. The way around it? Create a 95/98 boot disk on any machine, go to the Windows directory and blow away all *.PWL files. Weee... so much for password protection. Look at all the repeated TCP/IP and networking exploits, security bugs, etc. that we see daily in Windows via the media. Unless you consider the media part of "the propoganda against the guy on top". Windows' security flaws and bugs are not propoganda. They're real. ------------------ My company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then agreed to merge with another company, which also declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... should I be worried?
Now you've just hit on why there exists a monopoly trial versus Microsoft. If you want, we can go into it, but it has nothing to do with which OS is better. As an analogy, Sony's MD discs are in my opinion, far better than cassette tapes, yet there are more cassette users than MD disc users? Is it because tapes are "better"? No. I believe BetaMax fared the same fate vs. VHS, but I'd have to research that further. It's not always the best that comes out on top, but the "best marketed". ------------------ My company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then agreed to merge with another company, which also declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... should I be worried?
[offtopic]I always thought Beta died because Sony refused to license their stuff, whereas the VHS people (JVC et al) licensed their stuff to other manufacturers. So the VHs stuff was cheapers, so VHS won. Sorta like Apples vs IBM PCs. But I checked it out, and urbanlegends.com debunked me. [/offtopic] In my experience, Micros~1 OSes have always leaked resources. I ran NT 4 Workstation SP3 on the same box at the same job for over two years. After I rebooted that box, before I started any programs, I'd have 45MB memory in use. After working all day, I'd shut down all my programs, and I'd have 70 MB memory in use. Hmm. So I'd scour the process list and there's not a single process that wasn't running right after I rebooted. No new processes, but I have 25 MB more RAM in use. That didn't happen to me running Linux. I've left Linux boxes up for months, and they didn't leak at all. This doesn't happen because *nix systems are inherently better, it happens because NT 4 is full of leaky code. Someone could certainly write a leaky UNIX. If you're lucky, you can leave a Windows box up and running for a long time, but you're leaking resources all the time. Your box will perform less and less efficiently the longer it stays up. (Don't quote me on those 45 - 70 MB figures, but I think they're pretty close.)
I am sure they fixxed thousands of little bugs but in win98 they created just as many new ones if not more. <hr> Also I cannot go 3 days without rebooting win98. I have a pretty bad registry due to everything I have installed plus I run Photoshop and other high memory consuming products but still. ------------------ ~John~ Help keep the obsessed thread alive post the reasons why you are an obsessed Rockets fan by clicking here
OK, From 1989 to 1992 I worked for a commercial software company that specialized in solving the DOS 640K barrier...for the "Memory Management for Dummies" authors out there, we provided a means to run programs that require more RAM than any computer could support. Big money!!! We provided virtual memory. Then came Win 3.1 with virtual memory, so we thought we were done, and needed a new product. After running Win 3.1 beta (which Microsoft gave us) under some Integrated Cirtuit Emulators (ICE) we saw what it was doing to the hardware resources, and we decided Microsoft memory management was inherently wrong. This was not what the UNIX systems had been doing since the early '70s. So, we still had a product to combat memory leaking by the OS. We could improve it and sell it to software developers if not Microsoft itself, who was already licensing some of our stuff. What we learned was Microsoft did not really care. Intel and all the hardware manufacturers wanted a leaking OS, so programs ate more resources (both CPU and RAM). The conspiracy theory (which I have many unofficial comments regarding) is that Microsoft chose not to care about resource management because the hardware resource companies make money by upgrading people when programs eat more resources. This is commonly referred to as "planned obsolescence" in every other industry. Planned obsolescence is NOT a conspriracy theory; it is a proven way to do business based on getting customers to buy again. Microsoft memory management sucks!! It was my early career to study that and read Intel and AMD yellow books about CPUs. It appeared all planned, because they only needed marketing to win over the applications developers like Adobe and the game companies. Notice how they all say you must upgrade your hardware to run their stuff, except for Adobe's UNIX versions which just gave your more features on your current Sun machine. Like...oh yeah, your car engine needs to be replaced every six months...can you imagine that in a big 4 auto industry. There is no big 4 in software OS's. There is only one...and it is a monopoly that helps other nice manufactures like Intel build big businesses. Without Microsoft, Intel NEVER, NEVER overtakes AMD in the rush to 386s. AMD and Motorola had equal if not better chips at that time, and definitely equal sales. Intel went to bed with Microsoft. And after Intel's success, many hardware resource manufacturers went to bed with Microsoft. It is glorious marketing and business developement. MS and Intel rock for that. But the product leaks!!!!! and,,,and,,,The product leaks on PURPOSE!!!!!!!!!!
A late night heypartner sighting... thats rad. I use Windows 95, and I've never had any problems with it, but that's probably because I hardly ever use it for anything except for this bbs and the chronicle. I do know this though, I have tried reading every post in this thread, but I've yet to finish because I keep getting a headache. ------------------ [This message has been edited by Band Geek Mobster (edited May 03, 2001).]
Microsoft's products tend to deserve their reputation. I just think a lot of times, their OS gets lumped in with their other products-- the Office suite, for example. In other words, people used Windows 98, Word, Excel, and Office Binder. They have the typical problems with those products, get frustrated, and say "Windows sucks". I've caught myself with those words on the tip of my tongue when frustrated with the Word template my department uses-- and I am what's considered to be an "advanced" user (at least I think I am). If I could uninstall all the networking and SMS crap that our IT department loads on my box, I would have no complaints with Windows 2000. ------------------ BK: "Hey coach, great season. Thanks!" Rudy: "Thanks guys, appreciate the support." This really happened.
HeyPee has a good point. Pathetic management of memory and resources upon bootup (especially in DOS) was one of the reasons software such as QEMM survived and thrived. ... damn I loved that software. ------------------ My company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then agreed to merge with another company, which also declared for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... should I be worried?
Then why do people keep using AOL? Because its easy to use. ------------------ Im too drunk to walk ... Im driving home!
Kinda off topic, but still relates to M$... HeyP, DoD, or anyone else, Do you guys believe in the "conspiracy" that M$ does not disclose all of their OS API's to their partners so that they can gain an unfair advantage in developing competing software? I believe this is true, but I have nothing to back that up.
I have seen very few advertisements for Windows products of any kind, and none for Me. On the other hand I am constantly hearing about Linux. Where is the giant marketing machine. If Linux is as easy to use as Windows, and if the only thing propping up the Windows Juggernaught is marketing, why don't they just advertise Linux. Problem solved. I have used Solaris(?), or whatever it is that Sun puts on workstations, and I think it sucks. I also am not a big fan of UNIX or DOS or and command line based OS for that matter. Is Linux like any of these? I may have inadvertantly avoided the 49 day bug by rebooting when I changed the sounds or something, but I have never had my Win95 system crash. As far as memory leaks are concerned, the only time I ever noticed one was when I played Planscape: Torment, which if used for more than an hour would slow to a crawl. Anyway, it could be just my ignorance at the benefits of Linux (though I highly doubt it), but as of yet I have not found compelling reasons to switch. Maybe if they got together with some of the application developers they could support enough programs to make their OS worth while for personal use. I wanted to add, I have never seen a computer company marketed more than Apple, yet they continue to remain second banana to the PC. Here is an OS that is not only said to be better than MS, but it is just as easy to use. The are more things that go into which is better than simple performance. I would say the most important are software support and ease of use, followed by compatability with what others are using, although this last one is declining as the internet gains prominance. ------------------ "Of course, thats just my opinion, I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller [This message has been edited by Hydra (edited May 03, 2001).]
I think that the second half of your post proves the irrelevence of the first in two ways. One, the OS created by microsoft that is associated with the PC is made by a signle company and can thus be compared to Apple. Two, even when many are making one product(Linux), it will not neccessarily be more popular than the other produced by only one company(Windows). ------------------ "Of course, thats just my opinion, I could be wrong" -- Dennis Miller
Marketing is more than advertising. As any person who has had to endure a marketing class with tell you, Marketing consists of the 4Ps (sometimes extended to 5, adding "positioning" as an element) Product, Promotion, Place (Distribution) and Price. Clearly there are tons of marketing that Microsoft does aside from advertising. Their real power has largely derived from B2B marketing. People buy Windows a lot of the time because it usually comes with their machine. So when Dell or even Intel does all that advertising, they are, in effect, also advertising for Windows because most Dell or Compaq or even Intel-based boxes come with Windows installed (not always, but most of the time). ------------------ Houston Sports Board Film Dallas.com
I saw that after I wrote it I know the reason PCs out do Apples is PCs are inferior but cheaper [not THAT inferior] . . . Linux is Cheaper and VERY inferior to the avg user. PCs are the choice of business Windows is the choice of business I'm not thinking clearly but i think Apple just made some major mistakes on the path to where they are now. . . BTW ain't Microsoft like 25% owner of Apple? Rocket River ------------------
