: > ????? Greg Stempel: : > > Karl, : > > : > > I have two PCs running XP, what is wrong with XP? From: "Richard Martin" : I have two PC's with XP and never have any problems with either : one, unlike my old Win 95 machine (retired, thank heaven). : However, I never use MS Explorer. I'm no computer expert but I : think a lot of the problems people experience with Windows : relate to the Explorer browser. I prefer Firefox or Opera. me too, definitely an Opera fan :) I have one customer who frequently (daily!) visits dubious sites and every three months her machine would clag to a halt and I'd scrub oodles of trojans and viruses from her machine, patch it up, warn her and send her on her way (she had a decent AV package installed AND ran spybot, adaware and other cleaners - to no avail) Eventually I put Opera on her machine. it's probably a year and a half now and her machine remains virus/trojan free irrespective of the frequency which she visits unsavoury sites.. win95 had no support for usb, 98 is limited and needs drivers installed for almost anything to work - though it seems quite a few drivers work for different devices so once 'enough' are installed, windows seems to get the hang of things.. still, the fact that windows users found XP could handle new devices more readily seemed to make 98SE look shabby in comparison. ME was a blight, XP too intrusive. Too many times auto update once turned off has turned it's self back on again on SO many machines I service. Too many times it finds installed freeware equivalents of MS products and breaks them by changing a dll or a codec or an archive when updating one of it's own pieces of lint. There are workarounds to this sometimes, but it's not always a 100% success and it's a pain. Fine for users who only use commercial packages from big name brands everything seems to work just fine most of the time, though it'd be funny if MS released it's own version of jpeg compression and modified everyone's dlls to accommodate it - let's see Adobe sit back and take it if all of a sudden Photoshop couldn't load a jpeg because the library was wrong! Or if Adobe tampered with a MS dll, I'll be they'd rectify that pretty soon (!) It's probably Microsoft's way of making freeware look bad by mucking it up in the background.. and then there's the activation scheme. Again, for those who don't tamper with their hardware XP is fine but as soon as you swap a motherboard, a CPU or start fiddling with hard drives it's ongoing calls to MS to reactivate the software - and for those not connected to the web it's a bigger headache. AND then we had that loveliness with the 'illegal software' activation alerts, not to mention the Sony Rootkit installer that MS and other AV companies convenienty ignored! Win98 wasn't succeptable to it, but how many people out there to this day still have the rootkit installed, hidden, running on their XP PC's sending prvate information to Sony ? My biggest beef is the fact that so much legacy hardware won't run on XP. MS blames the software companies and many tech magazines follow the party line on this but it's not as simple as that - a 3.11 driver could be installed on a 98 system by creating a folder and putting the application in it and running it from there. 95 drivers could run on 98 and ME, but no - making such a shift in the OS as to preclude drivers running ensures you must 'upgrade' everything when you swap from an older windows to XP. The same will probably be true with Vista. And in 4 years time folks will be saying 'what's wrong with Vista? better than threat old XP' and someone like me will be bleating that they too have a $30,000 scanner that can't run on Vista and that's why they prefer XP ;) Those who come to Vista new will probably love it, never realising how much user control and power they could have had with a slimmer, faster, older OS. They'll grow up accepting MS lives in their study and monitors there every move.. 98 and 2000 is still supported by enthusiasts who continue to create upgrades and patches on their own time I have too much hardware with no XP support to warrant a change, and spend a fair bit of time changing and testing hardware and software .. XP would be counterproductive for me. Mind you, I always meant to have a machine around for testing purposes and to allow me to use XP specific software, like stuff that needs .NET and the like, but out of perversity I decided against having XP in my home ;) k
