Faulty hardware found on shuttle

Brett Buck wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:
Marvin wrote:
Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Oh, horsehit! Expecting it to run with negligible maintainence and no
progressive degeneration is not an unrealistic standard.

Why should I expect my computer to operate as nothing else in my life
does?

This only true if your standards have degraded due to constant exposure.
Run multiple different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor quality
and reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly obvious.

Hmm... My Windows box hasn't crashed outright in over a week, hasn't
had a program freeze in two or three days, and only needs rebooting
when one particular memory picky game is run.[1] The only people to
whom that is not acceptable are those with a pathological hatred of
Redmond, or an unrealistic standard of performance.

[1]Helps that I'm an informed user, and have tuned and cleaned my box.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Hmm... My Windows box hasn't crashed outright in over a week, hasn't
had a program freeze in two or three days, and only needs rebooting
when one particular memory picky game is run.[1] The only people to
whom that is not acceptable are those with a pathological hatred of
Redmond, or an unrealistic standard of performance.

Come on, Derek, you're setting your standards too low. My OS X laptop
hasn't crashed outright three times in 14 months, hasn't had a program
freeze in several weeks and only needs rebooting when I update system
software. My current uptime is about an hour under 5 days - remember,
this is a laptop, by the way, which goes into hibernation at least once
each night and wakes up rarin' to go without needing to reboot. It's
gone as long as about 22 days without restarting. My office Linux box
once went 47 days without a restart, and then it did only because of a
building power glitch. My current XP box has NEVER BSOD'd *except* when
I have driver issues: a USB audio interface I own can kill it in seconds
(go figure . . .) and video drivers used to be the bane of my prior
AMD-based system with Nvidia cards.

However, I can't get 98 to work routinely for nearly the same length of
time. A couple of days to about two weeks, tops, is the most I can get
the office machines to go. Some do much better than others, depending
on the apps they run. Quickbooks Pro, for instance, seems to have a
serious memory leak that Win98 doesn't take care of properly. One of
our accounting machines gets screwy if QB runs all day, while the other
(running XP) hasn't rebooted in several weeks (since the last MS
updates).

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Herb Schaltegger wrote:
In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Hmm... My Windows box hasn't crashed outright in over a week, hasn't
had a program freeze in two or three days, and only needs rebooting
when one particular memory picky game is run.[1] The only people to
whom that is not acceptable are those with a pathological hatred of
Redmond, or an unrealistic standard of performance.

Come on, Derek, you're setting your standards too low. My OS X laptop
hasn't crashed outright three times in 14 months, hasn't had a program
freeze in several weeks and only needs rebooting when I update system
software.

So what? I mean what does that level of reliability really gain you
for home or office usage?

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:


So what? I mean what does that level of reliability really gain you
for home or office usage?

A lot. Every hour spent being the office IT guy is an hour (or several
hour) I can spend doing my real job. Furthermore, every time Word or QB
Pro crashes, there is a non-trivial risk of file corruption. Retyping a
two page letter isn't a big deal but losing an entire appellate brief or
the day's financial work can result in a major reconstruction effort.

Yeah, I can tweak, nudge, update and fiddle with the Wintel boxen to get
them to work reasonably well (except for that damn Quickbooks/Win98
memory leak . . .) but the point is I shouldn't have to. And I don't
with my OS X machine. *THAT'S* the standard I've come to expect working
with OS X and that's how I now measure acceptability of a computer I
have to rely upon.

XP is much, much better in this regard. I just wish that if they're
going to slap a WHQL-Approved label on a vendor's device drivers, MS
would make sure the drivers really don't crash the system under common,
repeatable circumstances.

In home usage, if I want to record my guitar playing or my kids'
singing, or if I want to edit videos and burn a DVD for distant
grandparents, a driver glitch shouldn't be able to crash the box! When
XP BSOD's it can either restart fairly quickly (a minute or two,
usually) or slowly (a complete 1 gig memory dump can take awhile).
However, to be safe, you probably ought to do a scandisk upon restart,
but you still have a serious risk of a damaged file. If you've spent an
hour dumping a home movie to disk, you don't want to have to spend
another hour doing it again because the file you were editing got
damaged in the crash. Or if you're transcoding that file to MPEG2 (for
DVD authoring) you may have to do it again - also a lengthy process.

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html