;-)
Indeed, not wishing to devote too much effort defending the mess that is windows, but it is hard to think of any major facility or service that you would expect to find in an OS that is missing.
Complete with orange/grey wall?
It still brings a smile to my face and I've seen in many times. It may have been made tongue in cheek but it does neatly highlight where they go wrong.
I think that's true, plus it doesn't pollute the computer with (more) unrequired junk.
They are now supplying the NTL 250 as CPE which is manufactured by Ambit. This one has USB and Ethernet presentations.
One would want to put such a device in place anyway since it would be foolhardy to trust the security capabilities of Microsoft on an unrestricted internet connection.
I directly connected a PC with Knoppix to the modem and did the initial registration with that, then added in a Cisco 870 series router with DHCP enabled on the WAN port side.
These work pretty well IME.
Mmm... There is a difference between "not supported" and "doesn't work"
Security? Reliability?
No, the old boring grey...they don't suck at all.
Here's a giggle...no, it's not mine:
No operating system is totally secure, or totally reliable.
That is one of the biggest pains with lots of these CDs. Especially where they seem to spend ages fiddling with the branding on IE etc.
I think I have seen some of those as well - they behave in much the same way.
IIRC, should you run the CD they supply one of the things it is quite anal about ensuring a firewall is installed. While I agree with you about not relying on software firewalls, it does at least show a certain amount of responsibility in production of the supporting software CD. This could be one area where the CD would fail. Vista makes (by design) hooking low level system components (as is the want of most AV and firewall apps) much harder than with XP et al.
To an extent there is an element of damned if you do and damned if you don't here. They get slated for poor security, then get slated for braking old software by attempting to fix some of the shortcomings. (not having unrestricted access to all hives in the registry being other potential problems for old software).
There is, although it is easy to see how the difference can be lost on the causal observer.
Form without substance.
Well true, but if there were a spectrum, MS are distinctly in the inferior-red
Things that other platforms are better at certainly... but that still does not imply that windows ceases to be an OS as a result. It seems to be an argument along the lines of: a VW is a better car all round than a Lada, therefore the Lada is technically speaking only a moped.
Security is getting there slowly - but as you would expect it suffers by being grafted on as an afterthought.
Reliability is in general nothing like as bad as it once was. I don't recall many cases where I have needed to reboot a windows machine to recover from an error in recent years. Instability introduced by drivers is the main cause of problems, and MS have to put their hands up to that really since they actually changed the original NT design to make it weaker in this respect[1]. It is interesting to note that vista now reverses some of those changes.
[1] To increase performance of the GUI they moved much of the GDI and video card drivers into the kernal, whereas in NT3.51 they were user mode. Speed got better, but a whole raft load of stuff that previously was isolated from the system was now in a place to bring it down. Perhaps excusable for a user OS, but to make the same change to the server platform was inexcusable.(They also did a similar trick to increase performance when running Win32 API applications (which is only one of several APIs supported for user mode applications (OS/2 and POSIX being others), which resulted in a more close coupling between kernel and user mode API than was designed)
This is very true, and virtualisation technology is getting seriously good these days.
However I doubt MS will be too upset since it means they get to sell yet another license[1] to all those refusniks that have switched to Linux/OSX etc ;-)
[1] Also interesting to note that they EULA on vista precludes using the cheaper versions of the OS in virtual environments - you need to shell out for the expensive versions!
There comes a point where usability and maintainability is so poor, that it isn't fit for purpose. Windows straddles that line.
Especially as there doesn't need to be a local GUI on a server platform.
Housekeeping would be another.
For whatever reason best known to themselves, MS and developers of software for MS environments seem to manage to produce bloatware which has the inevitable effect of making the machine ever slower running and introduces incompatibilities and funnies which the average user has zero chance of fixing other than via a full or partial re-install with loss of data.
Even without that, Windows machines seem to suffer from a kind of entropy which steadily makes them even worse than when they began. For example, I began with a 3GHz notebook a couple of years ago and installed XP, MS Office and service updates on it. Within 3 months it was running noticably slower and within 6 had to be rebuilt. I cut the partition down and installed Linux on the rest of the disk with a similar set of applications. It remains just as zippy as it was on day 1 of the installation.
I suspect that a lot of this in Windows has to do with temporary files, caches and registry entries that are created and not properly maintained automatically, as they should be by the platform.
It is definitely the case that there is inadequate seperation of privilege in Windows, and that alone disqualifies it from being a proper O/S. It should never, ever, be possible for an unprivileged user to crash the O/S.
What exact problem are you having? Presumably you're connecting to the modem via USB and hence require drivers?
If the laptop has an Ethernet port use that - completely standard interface and will work with the modem without drivers (assuming Virgin modems have ethernet ports - I'd be surprised if they didn't). Connecting this way makes the choice of OS irrelevant.
Mathew
I agree. But being a bad OS does not mean it is not one. As someone else already pointed out.
Yes, try installing XP plus service pack2 and all the updates; you can recover 2GB or more by deleting all the stuff it squirrels away during the updates.
Was CP/M any better?
That was an OS, wasn't it?
Owain
Yes I realise that - it's just the obvious stuff.
All of that's before one gets to the temporary files, mess in the registry and all the rest of it.
Most windows users have "root" privilege though... ;-)
It's a grey area. I would say that the inclusion of a GUI makes it more inclined towards not being not an O/S than being one.
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