Re: Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself

Its certainly not more stable. XP's never crashed on me for anything other than hardware reasons (motherboard shorts, etc), so I dont know how I get more stable than 'never crashes'.

Hear, hear. This is my experience with XP SP2, too. Both my machines (a laptop and a workstation) stay up for weeks or months at a time, and I genuinely can't remember the last time the OS crashed on either.

Yes, applications crash sometimes, but not the OS.

HOWEVER, I know why it does for some people. The Achilles' Heel for XP (but also all Linuxes, and the Mac) is that (most) third party drivers run in kernel mode, which means they can tramp all over the OS if they go wrong.

In my experience crashes in XP itself are invariably caused by crappy drivers, and in fact this is borne out by the automatic crash reporting built into XP.

Believe it or not, I deliberately go against common advice and ALMOST NEVER update the drivers beyond what comes in the box. On those occasions where you MUST use a third party driver - because there is no support in the box - then obviously you should update it if it's causing crashes.

But I've never had a crash using 'in the XP box' drivers. If they provide the funtionality you need, don't upgrade them.

In February I upgraded my workstation to Vista. It crashed twice: once when I installed Logitech's joke of a mouse driver; the other time was when I installed NVidia's latest graphics driver.

I rebuilt the machine without those drivers, and it has been totally crash-free ever since.

Is linux More secure? Thats the rumor, sure, but since I've never had a security problem under XP, again, I have no way to measure 'more secure'.

Hear, hear, again. I've just installed Ubuntu 7.04, and it immediately downloaded no less that 113 security updates and bug fixes. When I reinstalled Vista, which came out months before Ubuntu 7.04, it downloaded 30-odd.

Doesn't look so good for Ubuntu, does it? (Yes, I've heard the argument that MS just leaves the holes unpatched, whereas Ubuntu fixes them. It doesn't convince me - read on...).

I've NEVER had a single virus, trojan or other malware on my Vista machine, nor on my XP machine which ran for years before that. And for the past 30 months I've been running WITH NO VIRUS PROTECTION SOFTWARE!!

Both my computers sit behind a normal router with NAT, etc. The XP machine had its software firewall switched off, as well as no anti-virus software, and ran like that for 18 months or so. The Vista machine has the default software firewall and anti-malware software running, but no anti-virus software, and has been running like this since February.

Problems? Zip!

How can Linux get any more secure than that?

SteveT










The program selection on linux is obviously far
smaller than windows, and since most of that is open source most apps are incomplete and poorly documented. And dont even get me started on that bilge called Open Office. So other than being able to show off to my friends about how cool I am because I use linux, why should I want to use it?

Dont get me wrong - the reason I've been looking at it again is because I want to build/port software for it (and Macs) to meet the requests of my customers. But despite all the hype, there's a reason Windows is still the dominent platform - its simply better at more things than is any alternative OS. And I dont see that changing anytime soon.




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