Dido wrote:
> > Mysterious undiagnosable errors still do pop up once in a blue moon > > Maybe you mean once in a blue screen, Andy... > > Sorry, just couldn't resist. :D (ducks!)
Hehe good pun. Seriously though, I have not seen a blue screen for a *couple of years* now under XP. MS have really got their driver act together and I dare say that with their driver certification program, their driver reliability is at least on par with, if not better than that of Linux drivers.
What you do get however are all sorts of weird (usually unfixable short of a reinstall) shit in GUI mode esp. when you don't secure your system properly (I have the sinking suspicion that 99.9% of internet-connected Windows PCs out there are infected with some kind of trojan, worm or spyware) or if you stress it long enough by installing a lot of different stuff. They don't crash the system but just make it annoying to use. These usually happen when something finally breaks XP's so-called 'self-healing' features (apparently the self-healing features do not heal themselves).
Still, XP is far far far more robust than Win 9x (though I still recommend reinstalling from scratch after 6 months or so... a painful procedure for me, as it takes me 3 days to put in all the programs I rely on.) Bottom line is Windows is finally stable and robust enough to be a reasonable workhorse OS.
Speaking of reinstalls, I think I'm in the mood to do a fresh new install of Slackware 10.0 on my HD. :-)
Now in Slackware's case, very much unlike Windows, I believe this is largely a redundant and unnecessary procedure(*). From what I know of Slackware's directory structure and package install/uninstall behaviour I have no reason to believe that upgrading versions will leave junk files around or leave you with something that is not exactly the same as a fresh Slackware 10.0 install with all your old programs and conf files put in. But still, there's an an irrational subconscious fulfillment (almost certainly gotten from using Windoze too much) gained from installing an OS cleanly from scratch.
(*) I remember doing fresh installs of ME and 98 and having these pathetic excuses for OSes blue screen on me even before I've actually installed anything else!!
In a testament to the simplicity and elegance of this distro's design, the instructions for moving from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 are here:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/UPGRADE.TXT
and they are only 6KB and 9 steps long!
For the longest time, I was almost sure Slackware was Linus' distro of choice as it is the distro that I feel represents Linux's philosophy best, but whodathunk he used Redhat (at least once upon a time)...
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