On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 20:23:36 -0600, "John Stricker"
wrote:

Or, perhaps you should just learn how to use it.. 7 machines here running
everything from 98SE, ME, XP home, XP Pro. Almost never have a problem.
Then again, I don't intentionally try to do things to create myself
problems.

First, I am not a booster of MS and I don't even like them and their
ethics, but:

I only have 4 here on a P to P network that run 24 X 7 with the CPUs
staying at nearly 100% utilization.
My wife's system stayed on 98 and then 98 SE for a longggg time before
going to XP Pro. She wouldn't let me change it as it always worked and
she kept hearing horror stories about other people's crashing.

Like you John, I had no problems with ME.

The only problems I've had have been related to line noise,
application conflicts such as Roxio and Nero being unwilling to run on
the same machine and those of my own making.

One of the worst programs for causing problems was "Autocad" as it had
some customized DLLs. I assume they no longer overwrite specific DLLs
with their own customized ones. The way around that, as I recall, was
to put the offending DLL in the root directory for Autocad and copy
the proper DLL back to its own location. Many programs have been
guilty of that.

Oh...and being I do a lot of programming on this one, I had some
problems with earlier versions of Visual Basic setting the creation
date on stock DLLS to the day a program was created. Which, like
Autocad would then overwrite newer DLLs which managed to thoroughly
trash the machine a few times. Never had a problem with C, C++,
Pascal, or Delphi. That is not saying I didn't make some mista... er
add some features that didn't crash the system, but they were at least
recoverable.

I have found NTFS to be much more reliable than FAT16 or 32.


Even my ME box that I use for my internet gateway has been running about 60
days since the last re-boot.

ME was like a lot of people. It was just fussy about who, or what it
chose as friends. At least with XP it warns you about programs it
doesn't like. Welllll... most of them. Get it up and running and it
was reliable, at least for me.


John Stricker

"Ed Wischmeyer" wrote in message
...

and other good windoz stuff.

Ain't no good windoz stuff. All junk. Bah, humbug!

Why is Monopoly Bill worth so much? Figure out how many hours you've
wasted rebooting, reformatting, trying to figure out manuals that didn't
make sense, undoing things that the program did all by itself to "help"

You should try IBM manuals. If you need them you won't understand
them. If you are capable of understanding them, you don't need them.

I will admit that requesting XP to *repair* a network connection is a
dangerous thing to do.

you, trying to get things to work as advertised, fussin' with viruses
and security flaws, etc. Figure out how much your time is worth per

The vast majority of virus infections are due to the lack of knowledge
on the users part and a demand for capabilities that open up the
systems. That they insist on running macros from within office
documents, send out complete VB programs to run databases with Access
tables, and read their news and mail in HTML, is not the fault of MS.
That the apps come with all the goodies turned on could be attributed
to MS, *except* if they weren't the majority of users would be on the
telephone wanting to know why.

hour. Figure out how many millions of people have had the same problems
as you. Multiply those all together to get Monopoly Bill's net worth.

We ran over 1,700 intel systems with Win 98 "on one site". I think we
had something like 7,000 of the things corporate wide. Having to
reboot was not a problem. It was quite a rarity. Many of these
machines ran 24 X 7. That in and by itself should say volumes about
configuration.

How did we manage when MS has such a poor reputation for stability?
We had a set configuration, or rather a set of configurations and
software packages that were tested for compatibility and stability. No
other apps were allowed on the machines. It could easily be worth your
job to change one of those configurations or install a non approved
program. Even approved ones had best be installed by the IS
department.

There is such a vast array of programs/applications available for the
windows environment that it's surprising there aren't more problems.
Many, like the early versions of Autocad have customized DLLs.
Programmers are an independent lot and even though MS tells us to
create our own DLLs if we need something with special functions theirs
still get modified.

yes, there are a great many loop holes in the various incarnations of
their OS and most of them are at least indirectly related to the
attempt to make the system easy for the average user and programmer.
The more complex the system the more likely you will find side effects
such as buffer over run.

The average user does not practice safe computing. The average user
is just barely computer literate under the definition and they
certainly are not "computer savvy". They tend to be of the "it won't
happen to me", "I only open attachments from people I know", and if it
crashes it's the systems fault, type.

According to a recent study about (think it was 38% )of the
population are computer literate. Unless people have changed a lot in
a last few years I think that is probably about 10% high. I taught
intro to computer science at the college level which would be way
above average. The general lack of a grasp of the concepts involved
was surprising for college level students, but at least 90 % of them
did learn how to turn 'em on, insert a disk, run an app, and turn 'em
off which qualifies as societies definition of computer literate.
There were only about 4 or 5 who received an A, out of 195 students.

Most were C and no few were D or worse.
Monopoly Bill hasn't created wealth, he's just transferred it -- like a
crook.


When it comes to business, most are a transfer of wealth from one
person to another, or people to businesses. However, PCs in general
and I do not mean the intel system that was given the copyright (PC),
have advance our quality of life and changes in our way of living (not
all for the best) in so many ways it'd be difficult to name more than
a tiny fraction. So, in that light Monopoly Bill did create a lot of
wealth for a lot of people.

You'll have to fix the return add due to dumb virus checkers, not spam
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair?)
www.rogerhalstead.com
Bah! Humbug!

Ed "you have to pay me to use microsquish products" Wischmeyer