CaptFalcon33035 wrote:

Your low HD life-expectancy is not because of Microsoft, it's because of your decision to reformat regularly, whatever that means. You can keep your Windows system clean and balanced without reformatting. I've been using Windows for many years and I've reformatted once (not including Windows OS upgrades). This thing is still running very well.

Also, ever think that you have faulty Nero software? BSODs come about when a program crashes, which is often because the program is trying to process too much information too quickly or screwed up with memory somewhere. Also, could be some kind of a conflict between another program, maybe, an anti-virus? drivers? Regardless, I don't think that's Windows fault, especially if it happens every time you open up Nero. Try updating and/or not using a pirated copy.

Before I forget, you can turn BSODs off. Instead, you receive a prompt telling you that the program has crashed and Error Reporting takes action, that is, if you let it.

AFAIK bsod's can't be turned off. It blue screens like that on purpose to protect hardware. I suspect his problems with nero are some type of faulty driver issue.

CaptFalcon33035 <---- has never gotten a BSOD. :D

Of course it's Window's fault. Why should a faulty program trash the OS?

A faulty program should, at most, go into an infinite loop and suck up processor cycles and memory. But the OS should limit the amount of memory used by the program, as well as the processor usage, to the point that it's still possible to kill it.

Guess which OSes sandboxes correctly. I'll give you a hint - Windows is not one of them.

Jp wrote:

Why should a faulty program trash the OS?

Except it wasn't the programs fault, it was the hardware which was screwing up causing the BSOD.

The funny thing is that Linux worked out-of-the-box, too. I just couldn't run anything that required hardware acceleration at a decent framerate.

And much as my comparison is slightly unfair in that I'm using Win98 on one end, the point stands that I can't use XP, because it literally would not run on this computer. I could probably manage 2000, but that's about it.

And I'm willing to bet 2000 would suffer from driver conflicts, too, unless I went and found them.

(Just as a random note - Windows wouldn't just run hardware-accelerated programs slowly, it would crash when I attempted to run them, until I installed special motherboard drivers. Linux handled it fine.)

Fedora Core 6. It's workable, has lots of the programs I'm interested in sitting on the disc, but is still newbie-friendly enough for little old me. I'm not quite as linux-savvy as I would like to be. But I pick stuff up as I go along.

A lot of cool stuff for laptops, easily connect to wireless networks!

This is one of the things I've had problems with with linux - wireless networks. My laptop has an Atheros-based 802.11g card, so I could install the madwifi drivers, but then getting them working required a bit of hand-hackery. It's not something a nontechnical user would have been able to do (But it's probably a plus for me - I learnt a lot more about wireless networks then I would have if it had just worked out of the box. I have a tendency to look at the silver lining)

Well, the main problem with WiFi is that everyone uses different drivers and nobody wants to explain how they work or releases drivers for OS other than Windows.

However, My laptop's WiFi works with Linux "Out of the Box", but not Windows. So it is really hit and miss. As Linux gains user support, however, it is gaining hardware developer support. I remember the day when pretty much 100% of the drivers made were reverse engineering pieces of art. People donated ungodly amounts of time to make a single piece of hardware work, because companies didn't bother to give technical specifications for their products.

Heh, yeah I'm still running Xp on one of my computers.

Xx Dark Wizard xX wrote:

I'm on vista right now. Its pretty much XP just really really shiny.

Yup.