At 05:50 PM 10/12/06 -0400, David W. Fenton wrote: >Where have you been Dennis? This has been the case since the >introduction of machine-based authorization in WinXP back in 2001 or >2002 (whenever XP came out).
My family's computers continue to function flawlessly because no one else touches their configuration or installs software. It's so cool when my wife comes home from the hospital to her lowly 300MHz Celeron box and says she can't stand how slow their brand new WinXP computers are. >I have to say that >Win9x is horrid in comparison to a more modern version of Windows. >There is just no contest at all -- the NT-based versions of Windows >are far, far easier to use and configure and administer. As far as I'm concerned, no. There are so many more steps to make XP work, it's terribly slow and loaded down with junk. It took me weeks to get the stuff cleared off the laptop, all the slow eye candy and animations scoured out, to the point that my fancy 2005 Intel processor laptop with XP Pro now works as fast as my 98SE system and its overclocked AMD processor from 2001. I know you and Johannes think XP is a peach. I think it stinks. It has added nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to my computing 'experience' except obscurity. Programs that are flakey in Win98SE (like Finale 2006) are still flakey in XP. WinXP locks up and programs crash. And all its famed uptime means nothing when it gets a little slower each day and still needs rebooting to have a reliable audio session. There's not one single thing I like about XP. (The only time my Win98SE server/firewall goes down is during a power outage. They happen every few weeks here, but we've had a long stretch recently. I just checked via VNC. It's been up 29 days, since the last electrical storm, and just feeds that 5MB cable speed nice 'n' slick while blocking every intrusion attempt -- sometimes hundreds an hour.) >legally, if you had an OEM Win98 installed on >your PC, you aren't supposed to be moving it to a different PC. Read >the EULA -- it's in there. The only difference with the authorization >is that the EULA is now enforced. I didn't have an OEM Win98 installed on my desktops. I've paid for installations and upgrades since Win3.1/DOS6. >I have never encountered any problems with WinXP authorization >because I don't believe in upgrading hardware. Maybe your customers have the money. I don't. I've been a freelance writer and composer since 1979, and there are months where my income is almost nothing, especially after the tech crash of 2001. I can't buy machines and peripherals when my gross is $540 like it was in September, and $40 so far halfway through October. That's why I keep my hardware and software tuned up and incrementally upgraded. I am still running two 100% reliable parallel port printers, for example, and a lot of legacy hardware that has artistic uses (like the three-pass scanner. which can create amazing effects by moving the original during the scan). This is not an office, it's a creative studio. It has to work to my vision, not some corporate bookkeeping paradigm a la John Hodgman (the Mac ads have got that right). I want an OS to work, and continue to work when I especially need it -- which is most critical right after a hardware upgrade and disaster replacement. I want to be able to clone and replace the failing disk and pull the motherboard with the blown capacitors without worrying about a software noose around my neck held by a bunch of corporate clowns who thought Bob and Clippy were really truly cool. The XP laptop was an investment I had to make for travel (my Pentium 100 couldn't do WiFi) and I wasn't ready to learn Linux. But WinXP is definitely now off the table for my desktops, and Eric (whose sophomoric Mac-cheerleading is usually just annoying) has done me a very big favor by giving me a real-life reason to install Linux for future work. So no, David, I haven't really been paying attention to Microsoft for a few years. I haven't needed to. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
