"Joachim Feise" wrote in message
...
The beauty of capitalism is that other companies offering similar systems
may
see that there is a competitive advantage by offering drivers for other
platforms

And I hope they do. I think it's silly that any Internet connectivity
solution is reliant on a specific software platform, which just building it
as an Ethernet access point gives you universal connectivity.

True, stability of Windows has gone up, but it is still not at par with
*nix.

If and when Unix supports the same feature set and wide variety of hardware
that Windows does, you will see Unix platforms stability having the same
problems people see in Windows. Conservatively, half of all crashes on
Windows are due to third-party software and have nothing to do with anything
Microsoft wrote or published.

People love to say the same thing about Macs. However, first of all, those
people apparently forget the "good old days" when the Mac didn't have a real
memory manager, and rogue applications caused the entire machine to lock up
all the time. Also, those people blame Microsoft and laud Apple, while
forgetting that the main reason Macs are so stable is that Apple has
complete control over all of the hardware and operating system combinations.
They simply have a much smaller test matrix to ensure proper operation.

There's a reason that there's a correlation between the number of possible
software/hardware combinations and the problems with stablility.

[...] There should be no reason for a plain software install to
require a reboot.

You are right. However, that's just not the fact of life with Windows.
Windows itself doesn't require a reboot for basic application installs, but
third-party publishers continue to write application installs that require a
reboot. That's not Microsoft's fault.

Beyond that, some installs DO require a reboot. Anything driver-related
that affects hardware that is initialized on boot is going to want to reboot
the system.

Regardless, it's been years (since I moved our last Win9x machine to Windows
2000) since I've had to reboot a machine just to fix a problem. All reboots
have been for reasons unrelated to system stability.

It is known, btw, that Windows often has problems with laptop hibernation.

And in some versions of Windows, it was actually Windows fault. Win98SE was
a particular abomination in this respect (though it did get patched soon
after release). However, most of the time it's due to inconsistent
implementation of the power control in hardware.

Regardless, neither of the laptops in our household have any problem with
suspend/hibernate/resume.

How well does Linux handle suspend/hibernate/resume? I've never tried it,
myself.

Pete