Not enough Windows bashing going on here. At work I've seen at least 4 Windows XP Pro boxes (maintained by "XP Pro guys" whose job is to do nothing but maintain XP Pro computers) go down in flames in 6 months through regular usage. Two become so unresponsive they were unusable, for no reason I can determine other than probably some kind of Registry corruption or God only knows what. Running company-wide antivirus, company-approved software, sitting behind a firewall, 3 GHz, 512MB RAM, and I could click the start menu and watch it draw onto the screen one line of pixels at a time. One had adware and spyware to the point where you could do nothing but watch it run. One was a brand new computer, fresh from the factory as of a few months ago, and it takes about two minutes to open Outlook or Word. I sometimes talk to the guy who comes down regularly, unplugs someone's computer, hauls it up the hill, and brings it back a couple days later wiped clean and ready to be slowly driven into the dirt again. I see the pain in his eyes, a pain I know all too well any time I get a phone call from a family member looking for me to "fix their computer".

Here's a trick for everyone who has XP to try. Make a new folder in c:\, name it anything. Click on it once in Explorer to highlight it. Now, click the filename again like you want to rename it. As quickly as you can after you click, type an R (as though the first letter of the new filename begins with R). See what happens. It's neat.

To everyone who used the "I have no problems with Windows" argument (even KNOWING that you'd lose the thread, which I might add you most certainly HAVE) I offer a quote from the article:

"Detection is difficult, and remediation is often impossible," Danseglio declared. "If it doesn't crash your system or cause your system to freeze, how do you know it's there? The answer is you just don't know. Lots of times, you never see the infection occur in real time, and you don't see the malware lingering or running in the background."
This is why we have thousands or millions of zombie computers acting as spam relays and God knows what else. People happily ignorant of the silently running viruses. So your computer is either fine or quietly evil. Good chance of either.

So far as only "retarded" people getting viruses, or it being the end-user's fault, what about the viruses that auto-download and install themselves without having to do anything at all? Blaster for example. That was fun.

Quote Originally Posted by Hsu
1) NTFS RW support is still poor, and I'd like to utilize my storage drive like I do on Windows without having to partition or reformat.
There's always FAT32. Hard drives are cheap. Or better, run a dedicated file server and use Samba. OS X and Linux can both run samba (client or server) just fine. If Windows supported anything other than its own partition types (like every other OS does) or opened the specs to NTFS so other people could write free drivers (which they haven't) you wouldn't have this problem, of course.

Yes, X responsiveness is not good. I can deal with the sub-second lag though, it's worth it for the benefits. It also depends on which window manager you use. Openbox for example is going to be much more responsive than KDE or Gnome.

I keep a 4GB partition where I run Windows for games. I keep it far away from anything important. And it still sucks, but it plays games. It takes one minute to reboot, it's not that big a hassle. Less time than it takes me to find a CD to stick in the drive.

There's always OS X too.