Pulling My Hair Out
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I don't see what your problem is with the Slashdot quote other than that it's based on inflammatory language which you don't like.
FACT: Windows 2000, XP, etc. significantly improved on the performance and stability issues of Windows 9x.
This is a *good* thing. The poster essentially is saying Microsoft has improved their product A LOT since those days -- which I agree with.
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EXACTLY.
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I am not saying 98 was the best product, but it worked very well for me in a few companies. We ran it primarily to get multiple monitor support for our imaging application without buying expensive hardware cards and it worked great.
Slashdot is great. It's funny and gets me news that I might otherwise miss. But some of the people are so anti-MS that they spew junk out there.
I am not thrilled with MS business practices at times, but that doesn't mean their products are crap. And it doesn't mean if there products are good that *nix is crap or that it's a worse value, or inappropriate.
BOTH OF THEM can do the job.
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I used Win98 and ME effectively for several years, but XP is infinitely more stable. Of course it really depends what you're doing with the system.
On 98, I'd typically crash 3 times per day if I was doing development work. Some of the crashes were due to my coding errors that took out the entire OS. If I made it through a day without a crash, I'd be very happy. A lot of the stability problems in 98 were due to bad install/uninstall routines that the OS didn't keep close track of.
Now on XP, rebooting is only done if I get unexplained behavior. I might reboot once in a week or I could go several weeks without rebooting. Coding errors might crash a process, but never the OS (ok, there was that ONE time, but that was a fluke).
I'm a Microsoft fan and have been using DOS/Windows since MSDOS 2. But even being biased, I agree that the difference between the stability of XP and 98 is huge. I have to agree with the slashdot comment on this one.
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As my nickname suggests I've have had in the order of magnatude 2 to the power of 192 General Protection Faults or Page Faults in my day, mostly to me pushing the OS to beyond its initial design, a fact i'm rather proud of really..
My words of recommendation are to the naysayers to the MS line of OS's is the following, 0's and 1's are free and therefore is nothing stopping one from making ones own OS and software.
I have to admit though I am having trouble keeping up with posting any further due to the rather nifty animated gif from 'Lovell.' Very cool.
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I bought Windows ME, and was never able to keep it running longer than a day before it was completely hosed, calling for a reboot. Built it multiple times. On that particular box, the other OSes all ran fine. Apart from that experience, I've never had a problem with any of the other MS OSes from DOS 2 to XP.
The person who caused the editorial to be written had an agenda; it's as simple as that.
John Scarborough
MCDBA, MCSA -
Wow, what a brillant reply to a thread about people who generalize! At my last company, we used mIRC and a local IRC server to maintain secure communications while we were working on technical issues amongst our staff. (we used VPN to shield those folks who were off-site) We did this instead of trusting the major IM networks....
And, I receive a TON of help from folks - usually on open source projects - on IRC.
This reply is like saying "Oh man, he has a crowbar - he MUST smash windows and steal things for a living!"
About the original editorial: You have a stable TIVO? Wow. Where can I get one of those?
The worst thing to happen to my living room is the oncoming instability of more software in my consumer devices. Bring back analog! -
Stable, works everyday, but seems to be slowing...
maybe it's Windows 98 embedded in mine and not Linux
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98 was not a stable operating system; and the large number of crappy applications written for it sure didn't help. NT pre-4.40 was not very stable either, at least for server class applications. I'm glad you didn't try to defend Me.
NT 4.0, 2K, XP, 2003; all decent operating systems.
Saying 98 was unstable isn't being anti-Microsoft; it's being truthful. It's not even that the OS was bad; but the things it allowed applications to do was bad. We forget about a lot of that stuff in the age of managed code. MS learned a few things, and XP and .NET are products of that.
I mean, come-on. Slashdot has plenty of anti-Microsoft articles; couldn't you have picked a better one to make your point? Although; if you go to the site and search for "Microsoft", you'll see that the MS bashing isn't going on as much as it used to.
cl
Signature is NULL
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Stability depended a lot on apps and hardware (specifically the drivers). Yes, 98 and ME let vendors get away with things they shouldn't have. Hence a lot of the stability problems.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley -
Well this thread has been done to death but my 2 Cents anyway.
I've worked on every MS OS that has come out since DOS 2.0 and I've never been real happy with any of them, but they pay the bills and that makes me happy. At one company I worked for we had three Win 98 boxes for a specific purpose, they all had identical hardware, they all ran the same app and they were on the same desk. One system needed rebooting about every 7 hours (we set up a schedule to check it and fix it when it broke), the other would stay up for a week or more, and the last one would only crash when you tried to shut it down, but would just stop working at random intervals. We replaced Win 98 with NT (only change) and all three were suddenly getting uptimes of about 3 to 4 weeks on average. I figure that the designers of 98 put in a random uptime generator and said "This'll keep em guessing. Hah! Job Security!"
On the other hand, on my own personal workstations I've never been able to keep a system up without crashing something my self. I guess I'm not a stable user (I like to poke things and see what happens, Hee Hee!)
Go Figure.
Scott
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When the Slashdot poster and I came over on the Mayflower, we didn't have PCs. All we had was a mainframe. And if we had had as many problems with the mainframe as we do with our PCs, we'd still be in Holland.
I know, there's lots of neat stuff you can do on a PC that if they could happen at all on a mainframe, it would probably take you the rest of your career to figure out how to do them. And with any kind of luck, that neat stuff is somewhat related to what your employer is paying you to do. But as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft lowered the bar as far as software quality was concerned.
(And I'd feel the same way even if Visual Interdev didn't give me a 'memory could not be read' error every time I pressed the End Debug button.)
Because I have a wow! button instead.
Mattie
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I find it interesting that you would say a tivo is stable, isn't that like saying a toaster is stable? I mean it is a single function device that you are not installing/running applications on.
No comparison to a device that literally lets you install thousands of programs (my wife may be coming close to this on her XP box) - and still remain somewhat stable - you get a much better chance of remaining stable if you keep the spyware and viruses off your box/network.
Michael R. Schmidt
Developer -
Tivo isn't a great comparison, but even single use boxes, like a dedicated WINS server or something have issues. Plus it's started to slow down, how's that happen on a single use box? Is TiVo installing something?
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95 and 98 had lots of nice features but they were, by today's standards, extremely unstaable. I can remember having nightmares with the 98 shutdown problem (even on new machines with no non MS software), and finding on the MS KB that the recommendation was to disable several 98 features with the admission that even then some machines would still not shutdown.
Most of those problems, it seems, come from trying to marry DOS to Windows, which explains why 2K, XP etc are much better.
I have no fond memories of those days.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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