scott wrote:
>> 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.

I find that rather interesting - Word's inability to not crash is 
legend. Everywhere I've ever been that uses Word has had endless 
reliability issues.

>> 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?

No - principly because much of the OS is in ROM. If it weren't, they'd 
have probably designed it so you can.

>> 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

OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

> automatic updates

Which is only necessary because the software wasn't done right in the 
first place.

> protecting itself from nasty programs 
> that try to access things they shouldn't

Hasn't UNIX been doing this for the last 40 years?

> providing common dialogs for all applications

AmigaDOS does this. (Indeed, I found a program to replace the standard 
dialogs, so I *know* it does this.)

> plug and play

The hardware for that didn't exist at the time. (Although AmigaDOS does 
support hot-swapping PCMCIA cards seemlessly.)

> CD/DVD-RW access

Wrong. My Amiga has a CD-RW drive, and it works just fine.

> wireless networking

Or, indeed, *any* networking. That kind of thing used to be expensive...

> remote desktop

Finally, something useful. Yes, well, if you take it that we don't have 
networking, this is clearly a non-option.

> configuring machines remotely
> network file systems, 
> network printing,
> offline files

...and so are those...

[Although with the right hardware, you could in fact set up primitive 
"network" file systems under AmigaDOS. And they work like local ones. 
Just need the hardware to connect and a driver.]

> hibernating

Doesn't really require much OS support, does it?

> file type associations

OK, that one AmigaDOS did lack. And it was actually annoying.

> encryption

Would be fairly trivial to add.

> working in multiple time zones, working with different 
> region settings,

Nope. AmigaDOS had those.

> firewall.

No network, remember? ;-)

>> And how in the name of God do you find out what *causes* one?
> 
> Gulp.  Look in the event log.  Use Google.

The STOP messages give generic error codes. Google will just tell you to 
check your hardware isn't faulty, uninstall any new software, etc. The 
event log tells me nothing except the STOP code.

>> 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.

Well, given that none of the PCs are remotely the same, it's gotta be 
printer drivers. That's the only thing where the same software is 
installed in more than one place.

We had a Toshiba printer that caused endless crashes in anything that 
touched it. We got rid of that! (I used a generic PostScript driver 
instead.) However, the rest of our printers are all HP. I was under the 
impression they're quite good at software...

>> 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?

They don't?

> It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you might think of MS.

Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
"normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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