And I would be out on the street, begging.

Reading Steve's post is like reading one of my many posts on the subject
over the years.  We have several Windows NT and 2000 machines at the office
and they are extremely reliable.  Over the years, I have advocated having
good hardware on which to run the OS and not putting junk software on it.

Steve is right, I have not had AOL on the systems for over a lustrum, and I
certainly do not have any of the third party shrink-wrap utility software
that you find at CompUSA or Fry's in the yellow boxes.  I remember a few
years ago an friend of mine was installing Windows 98 followed immediately
by that suite of products.  He did this 3-4 times and was always rewarded
with a system that just plain did not work.  He immediately blamed MS and
cursed them to high heaven.  I suggested to him that he might simply
install Windows 98 and leave the yellow box contents off the system.  After
debating for an hour or so, he did just that and lo and behold, the system
worked fine.  Magic.

I stay away from all manners of screen savers, virus checkers and system
utilities.  I download and install very little from the Internet and only
from very select sources.  I treat my work Windows machines as if they were
3000s.  I give them the finest hardware and the best software I can find
and I am rewarded with reliable, working systems.

Every once in a while,  MS Office will act up and do something silly, but
the machines just keep on plugging.

As Steve so eloquently put, if you treated your 3000s the way many, if not
most people treat their desktop machines, you would not have reliable
3000s.  I can just imagine people going to the street corner to get a SCSI
card or a disk drive to put in their HP e3000 997-1200, buying them from
Happy Sam wrapped in a bag from the nearest grocery store.  They would then
load the drivers from a diskette with no company logo or name.  When the
system would promptly crash, they would blame HP for putting out such a
lousy OS that crashed all the time.

I used to argue with people who complained about MS Windows, but I don't do
that any more.  If they have not figured it out by now, they never will and
I have other things to do.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 288-7438
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Steve Dirickson (Volt) [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Wednesday, September 05, 2001 7:24 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: OT : some facts and stats

> > 9. BUT!!! If Microsoft Windows' users can claim US$1 for every time
> > their computers hang because of Microsoft Windows, Bill Gates
> > will bankrupt in 3 years!!!
>
> That's a great line - and absolutely true!  If I were to collect a
> dollar from Mr. Gates every time one of our systems crashed,
> I wouldn't have to work for a living!

OTOH, I'd starve to death. I can't even remember the last time any of my
3 machines (1 Win2K Advanced Server, 1 Win2K Pro, 1 Win98) crashed
because of anything other than failing/failed hardware. Kind of like
MPE. Well not quite MPE-level yet, I guess.

Based on how frequently I post comments like this, I suspect that I come
across as some sort of MS apologist. Believe me, I am not. I thought MS
should have been forcibly divided into separate "platform" and
"application" companies the last time this issue was popular, almost 10
years ago. I don't agree exactly with Jackson's specific dividing lines,
but a forced split this time would have been OK with me.

Cecile commented the last time I made this claim that Denys and I are
the only people she knows who never seem to have problems with Windows.
I jokingly responded that perhaps he and I are the only people she knows
who have never had any kind of AOL software on their machines. In truth,
I have no knowledge of Denys' (or anyone else's) use or non-use of AOL.
But I can't help but believe that the majority of the problems people
experience with their Windows-based machines are actually due to
third-party components: device drivers, filter drivers, DLLs, whatever.
Of course, MS has to take its share of the blame even for those, because
of its decisions on where the various components "live" in the OS and
processor-privilege hierarchies, and on how key system components are
managed--or rather, not managed. But the bottom line is that a lockup or
crash due to a faulty video driver or network-stack module from a third
party is no more MS's fault than it was HP's fault when I blew up one of
our MPE boxes due to something like a misaligned parameter passed to a
system intrinsic.

Why is this "don't blame MS for other people's mistakes" issue
important? Because blaming MS for everything bad that happens on a
Windows box
 1) Raises the noise level, reducing the probability that a problem that
actually IS caused by MS components will be detected, identified, and
fixed
 2) Demotivates the people who should be motivated to find and fix the
MS problems: "Heck, if we're going to be blamed for everything anyway,
why bother to clean up our stuff?"
 3) Allows the third parties to continue producing defective components
that will continue to cause problems


P.S. If you're thinking that I experience so few problems because I run
a "clean" machine: as a developer, occasional gamer, and chronic utility
downloader, I install, play with, and remove software of all kinds with
reckless abandon; the registry on my *laptop* is currently over 25MB
(the registry on a freshly-installed Win2K Pro box typically runs around
8MB).

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