"Robert Siegel" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> I stopped using hibernate or any variant such as instant-on years ago. It has never been
> trustworthy for me. On the other hand, XP Professional has been a dream operating system since I
> upgraded my computer from ME. XP
has
> been damn near bombproof.
Windows ME was a bad joke. What a steaming pile of manure it was. Even if you knew exactly how to
disarm its stupid "helpful" features, it was slow and unreliable.
Windows XP is really just Windows 2000 v2.0 with a lot of gew-gaw slapped on for looks. Windows
NT/2000/XP is actually just good old IBM/Micro$oft OS/2. Yep, no kidding. It's an IBM product, with
a lot of junk piled on. Microsoft likes to tout XP's estimated 40 million lines of source code. Of
course, real programmers like to chuckle about anyone who brags about large amounts of source code,
since that's evidence of poor programming technique. It would be a bit like bragging that your bike
is very heavy and slow, as if that were a benefit. (We all know Windows is slow - and it's also
bloated! Yay!)
Don't get me wrong - I use Windows 2000 and XP every day. They are indeed reasonably stable,
although many of the included apps are *not* stable (Outlook Express 6, Explorer.exe, MSIE6) and
crash all the time on my machine. MS Office is famously bug-ridden, and I can vouch for that. It's
actually getting worse as feature bloat grows to ridiculous new levels.
If you want truly amazing stability, try Red Hat Linux 7.3. It's quite a nice desktop OS, with
Ximian Evolution (Outlook clone) and OpenOffice (MS Office clone), AbiWord and other freeware
productivity apps running under KDE or Gnome GUI's. Installation is painless, and the installer
boots from a CDROM. If you have an old PC laying around, give it a try.
Did I mention that it's FREE? You can download the .ISO images for all installation CDROM's for
almost any version of Linux, including Red Hat. Lindows is supposed to be the best mimic of Windows;
but it's not freely downloadable as a compiled binary.
-Barry