Today in my English 352 class, someone was presenting a project using a laptop from my school through a projector...the laptop was a Dell running Windows98 SE and it had been used before. Well, today right before the powerpoint presentation opened, BSOD. I smiled. Then they rebooted and no network (which was needed for some sound clips). So they asked if anyone knew anything about networking, I walked over and everything was fine...turns out the ethernet cable was in the wrong jack (there are two ethernets in every room with one registered to that PC...) and we had to restart so it would recognize everything. Then what happened on reboot, no sound.

I couldn't help but smile knowing that it's been a month that i've been in Mandrake, and it's been a good month. A very good month without that crap.

Touching story

Glad to hear you are having a good time in Linux, I've moved your thread to the General forum as it's more of a general story than a Mandrake specific problem/question

Cool

A classic! Maybe another time you can help them recover that kind of situation with a Knoppix CD if you have one

Am I just lucky, or is having technical problems with Windows really all that common? Although I've finally gotten Gaim 0.75 to work under Debian 3.0 stable, it took much more effort than it should have. Windows has never given me as much difficulty as even the apt-get wonderfulness of Debian in installing software. It's ridiculous that a program will crash just because it cannot find a particular font.

Clearly you never used Windows 95 through 98, which regularly refused to start because they could not load marlett.ttf (which draws the maximize, minimize and close boxes). Easy way to get a blue STOP error at boot, which required one to remove the corrupted version (why was it corrupted? Who can say. It just was.) and reinstall said font from DOS.

You're just lucky. . Really.

A program crashing isn't the same as an Operating System refusing to work. Like I said in my story, we had to restart the system just so it would detect the network. That's unacceptable.

But yes, I do have a Knoppix live cd...I should start carrying one to class...

yes win9x OS have a very bad habbit of eating them self to death. by this i mean the OS will litteraly destroy it self over time.

win95a after roughly 6 months of use was basicaly useless and had to be formatted and reinstall the full OS, drivers, patches from scratch just to keep it working properly.

win95b was a little better, but not by much. it gave about an extra 30 days.

win98a was worse then 95b in stability and reliablity. would crash just for the sake of crashing.

win98SE was the FIRST real OS M$ every put out that lasted longer then 6months and was semi stable. nice gaming platform and you could get between 9-12months before you had to format reinstall. much better.

winME is just a joke, and is such a nasty OS, that any of my customers that run ME i just sell them a new OS and format reinstall so they dont have to worry about that junk OS.

now the 2k and XP pro(corp edition) are nice OS and much more stable, but still nothing compaired to what ive seen in the *nix world.

win2k pro is prefect for laptops as is XP pro for laptops. both of them on workstations will give you between 18-24months before you have to format/reinstall and will crash after about 3-7 days depending on the amount of use they get.

win2k server i can get about 7-21 days before i have to reboot as its locked something up. mind you all my little 2k server does is not much:

AMD 800 athlon
512M pc133 ram
SCSI HDs not raided up.

it is a DC (domain controller)
TS is set to remote administration. this gives 2 free TS simotainious(sp?) logins that we use to access QuickBooks with
TZO software runs on it (dynamic DNS so i can TS remotely when my IP changes)
DNS
Nortan AV

that is all it runs and i will get between 7-21 days before i have to reboot the system as its locked up someplace. this in a shop with 2 workstations. not heavy use by any means.

the workstation im typing from right now is winXP pro(corp edition) and i have to reboot this at the least once every other day. this gets some nasty abuse though from my wife, and daugter.

i could go about 7 -10 days on my older slower win2k workstation that i just converted over to RH9 and will see how long it will go before it needs a reboot. its up 10 days so far without a burp.

so yes M$ is not know for its stabilty or reliability.