Is this slashdot or Classiccmp? Re: Microsoft bashing

Josh Dersch wrote: Warren: Again, the "r" word... What's about my post makes it a rant? I mean, this is as if I were to accuse others of being paid by Microsoft... apparently anti-anti-Microsoft rants ARE allowed. Right? You are allowed to say whatever you want, but on a list such as this it is very rarely productive. This has to be the wisest statement in this thread, so far. No offense, but your musings seem to be more inflammatory than mere relations of experience -- stuff like "I could do a better job given the money". (paraphrasing since my phone won't do copy/paste) does not come without some emotional weight. No offense taken. Yes, my experiences have given me opinions. Humans are DESIGNED to form opinions and conclusions. The process does not always work correctly, but it is always working. Claims of utter objectivity by humans are utter bollocks. But, as opposed to a rant, I really DO wonder how software that has earned billions and lasted twenty years even has these issues. I've been involved in many software projects, and a lack of time is second only to a lack of money as an obstacle to stable code that does its job. So, I'm genuinely perplexed as to how this process works. I've no idea what your intent is, but as it is posts in this vein (see also emacs vs vi, apple vs anything...) mainly raise flames, they don't really promote useful discussion. I am less certain than you seem to be. I consider THIS to be useful discussion, for example. But... Yes, some subjects are close to pure flame bait. That doesn't mean that discussion is impossible -- just dangerous. Well, in that case I'd suggest the cause could be terrible hardware drivers. They are the cause of the vast majority of instability problems. I'd also suggest memtest86 to ferret out memory issues. I've come to the conclusion that it is the NVidia video card drivers. Others seem to use them well, though. Everything else is rather recent Dell drivers. *SIGH* Windows XP generally very stable. I have machines at work whose uptimes have only been interrupted by power failures. Good. I'd like to have that record going for me. If you get regular BSODs do a full dump and I can take a look to try and narrow down what's faulting. No, I don't generally get BSOD crashes. I just get response times that get so horrific that it will take 3-4 minutes to close a simple browser window, or to shut down Windows Explorer. As I say, with my preemptive reboots, I have not had these experiences recently. But, if left alone, they DO end up in BSOD. Would it be helpful to let it go there, just to get the dump? Actually, though, if you're good at the XP stuff, I have some files I can't delete I'd like to email you about privately... And thank you so much for your willingness to HELP in this. It's refreshing and a fine renewer of the faith! Thanks again, Warren