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Christopher Hunter wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 11:10 +0000, Peter Cannon wrote:
>   
<growingly tedious slanging match snipped>

You're both just flying off the handle now, as usual the truth lies
somewhere in between.

Christopher: Windows 7 is not only an improvement over Vista (not hard I
know) but also over XP, it has way better security out of the box which
is borne out by my experience running a PC repair business. I very
rarely see Vista machines with malware and I see LOTS of XP machines
riddled with the stuff. Now MS have toned down the incessant UAC
prompting this has become a win. Mandatory driver signing in the 64bit
version has also improved security, albeit at the expense of making it
difficult/impossible for free software developers to write drivers.
Also, lots more hardware is supported by automatic updates now which,
although we're used to it here in linux land, is progress for Windows.
It's also tolerably fast on older hardware as ong as you have plenty of
RAM and the interface is simple and pleasant which is what your average
Joe wants. Naturally all MS software has bugs but I don't think, on
average, they're any worse than any other commercial vendor, or as other
have pointed out, the latest Ubuntu!

Peter: I had a copy of Windows7 on launch day and while I didn't
experience the same level of pain as Christopher it did take ages to
install and I had my first bluescreen within an hour. I think I have
fixed that now but only time will tell. Likewise only time will tell if
it suffers the same chronic startup and shutdown churning as I see all
the time with Vista which, need I remind you, was the biggest turkey in
modern OS history. While Windows may be OK for the mass market desktop
it's just not good enough for desktop power users, I mean if people
think it's frustrating having to administer and troubleshoot linux with
the CLI where does that leave having to administer and troubleshoot with
regedit32? It's pathetic really. I don't see why you can't understand
people's problems with MS, they are a horrible company. Even if they
made technically flawless products I would still try and avoid them
because of their lousy philosophy, culture and unconscionable business
practices...

And they ARE evil. They recently shut down one of my favourite
companies, a system restore disk vendor called gennersales who I used to
buy legacy recovery disks from. They were a great business, recommended
by many big PC vendors who didn't/don't stock parts for machines over 2
years old and Microsoft shut them down for the crime of supplying copies
of software to people who had a license to use that software! Now,
instead of it costing me £25 to fix somebody's old PC and getting the
software the same day, I have to spend >£65 on XP-Home which takes 2/3
days to arrive and then I have to download and install all the drivers
by hand, brilliant. Of course I can only do that while XP is on sale
which won't be much longer, then everyone with <1Gb of RAM who's hard
drive croaks will have to buy a whole new computer. These higher costs
directly translate into more polluting electronic junk in the worlds
landfills and less cash in UK consumers pockets. Thanks for that Microsoft.

Roger.
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