scott wrote:
>> Sadly, M$ has managed to convince the general population that it is 
>> "normal" for computers to not work propperly. If you bought a washing 
>> machine and it didn't work properly, you'd take it back and demand a 
>> refund. But when people buy a computer and the software on it doesn't 
>> quite work properly, people just think this is "normal" and 
>> "acceptable". This, truely, is M$'s contribution to the field of 
>> computer science.
> 
> Yeh you keep going on about how bad MS are, but I just don't see this.  
> Our whole company (as do many others) run on MS servers and MS run 
> desktops.  We really don't see the level of problems you describe.  Last 
> problem we had in the office was when IT installed a buggy print driver 
> on the print server, it caused Word (well, any application that had 
> print functionality) to crash randomly.  Of course everyone blamed MS, 
> but then IT fixed the print driver and everything has been fine since.  
> I don't even remember the last time Word or any Office program crashed.

I don't know when Word last crashed either. This is because it happens 
so frequently that our users don't even bother calling me any more. 
(Because they know I can't do anything to make it stop crashing.)

Similarly, of the 50 PCs we have, every single week at least one of them 
suffers a blue screen of death. (That's not counting the PC at my desk - 
I think *that* one is actually faulty...)

Our servers, fortunately, *are* more or less reliable. (Except for that 
one I have to reboot every 3 months... Every day it runs slightly 
slower, until eventually I have to reboot it to make it service user 
requests. Don't know what's up with that.)

Don't even get me started about printers...

(Yes, naff drivers are usually to blame. But I still maintain that it's 
M$'s attitude of "quality isn't important" that makes people think they 
can get away with selling hardware with naff drivers...)

>> I *was* going to sell my old CPU on ebay. I mean, it's a moderately 
>> old now, but I paid about £250 for it when I got it.
>>
>> However, this was before I discovered that you can buy it new (exact 
>> same model, clock speed, socket, everything) for £21.
> 
> Well at least you checked the price.  Some people just say "bought new 
> for X, will sell for X/2", when in reality it's worth X/10 or 20.

As I understand it, AMD currently can't touch Intel for performance, so 
they're going mental slashing prices instead...

>> Do you even remember when WinXP first came out? And how everybody has 
>> utterly horrified at the minimum hardware requirements to make it 
>> function acceptably? It's been around so long now that everybody seems 
>> to have forgotten that XP takes four times as much hardware to do the 
>> same thing as older OSes managed to do quite happily...
> 
> If it does the same thing, why are you using it?  Why does anyone use it 
> if it does the same thing as previous versions?

Because almost no software will run on it any more.

Seriously. I'd still be using WinNT if it wasn't for that.

>> (And then there's the sad fact that M$ doesn't know the difference 
>> between "operating system" and "entertainment system". Even in the 
>> "pro" version of XP, you still get lots of silly toys like games and 
>> video players and so forth that I have to spend ages uninstalling. 
>> Surely what most businesses actually want is a tiny OS to run their 
>> *real* applications on top of...)
> 
> Gee, I'd hate to work at your company where the IT people don't even let 
> you watch videos or play an odd game of Internet Reversi during a break. 
> Actually some of our customers send us video clips of problems 
> sometimes, it would be a bit embarrassing if we had to explain how we 
> chose an IT system that didn't allow us to watch them...

Well, clearly you work in a different business sector than me then. ;-)

The purpose of our PCs is to run Outlook, Word and Excell, and also the 
specialist lab software we use. If it weren't for these few things, we 
wouldn't even need computers at all. (Would make my job a lot easier. 
Oh, wait...)

> People also use WinXP Pro at home you know, I think everyone in my 
> family and even my gf on her laptop has the Pro edition.

Yes, I think that's mainly due to the silly restrictions in XP Home. 
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Vista. (I forget how many 
versions of that there are...)

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