> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like OpenOffice 
> and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.

For me MS Office works reliably - and it's not like I only use 5% of its 
features.

> Interesing you should say that. You're aware of course that the fist Amiga 
> was a 16-bit machine, and the later ones were 32-bit? Or that originally 
> the graphics hardware only supported 12-bit colour, and later added 24-bit 
> colour? Or that originally you could only have 6 bits per pixel and later 
> you could have 8?

And you could use the same OS version with all these hardware 
configurations?

>> Just have a browse through the services running on your machine...
>
> So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the background 
> by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* stuff does 
> Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?

Virtual memory, automatic updates, protecting itself from nasty programs 
that try to access things they shouldn't, providing common dialogs for all 
applications, plug and play, CD/DVD-RW access, wireless networking, remote 
desktop, configuring machines remotely, network file systems, network 
printing, offline files, hibernating, file type associations, encryption, 
working in multiple time zones, working with different region settings, 
firewall.  I'm sure there are more, but those are the most useful.

> That's not a crash, that's a parse error. Most likely due to a subtle 
> interaction in your SDL code...

Nope, nothing was changing - the next time it stopped on a different frame. 
I narrowed it down to some buggy handling of spline objects and arrays. 
Just had to re-start the rendering on the exact frame whenever it stopped.

> And how in the name of God do you find out what *causes* one?

Gulp.  Look in the event log.  Use Google.

> I mean, sure, it tells you what was happening at the exact instant the 
> crash happened, but how do you find out what the actual problem is?
>
> All the STOP messages I get are either UNHANDLED_KMODE_EXCEPTION or 
> IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Could be anything.

Those are usually due to bad hardware drivers or bad hardware itself.  Given 
that you're seeing this on several machines, I'd place my bets on some bad 
drivers that you've installed on all your machines.  SOmetimes in the event 
log you get a clue what the problem is, if not you can just use trial and 
error, but it might take some time if you're only getting these errors once 
a week.

> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. Unfortunately, 
> there isn't.

Of course there is something you can do.  How do you think other people sort 
out problems like this?  It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you 
might think of MS.

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