Friday, April 27, 2007

More Shoddy Comparisons

It must be open season again for the Microsoft advertising budget. All that fawning that mainstream tech media is doing over Vista. Nauseating really.

Oddly though the comments on the blog seem to be by mostly Linux users. Could the old print media be judging their audience so poorly? That's certainly never happened before huh? My comments:

I agree with the early posts that this was not a particularly fair comparison (I've seen much worse though). I have a single machine here at home that still has Windows on it. Several others are either Apple's OS X or pure Linux. I had to boot into Windows for the first time last night to try out some software for a friend, and letting it boot into Linux first (by mistake) I was reminded that it had been 380+ days since the machine was last used. I guess I can safely say that I'm no longer a Windows user.

That doesn't stop me from getting regular phone calls from people who still do use Windows and are "stuck".

In the race to get to technology that "just works" Linux has come a long way, and I think you have to give the edge to OS X not Windows when it comes to commercial software. the problem with Windows though is that it suffers from a syndrome known as "it worked yesterday". No matter how experienced or careful a Windows user is, his Windows installation will degrade over time, getting slower, less reliable and eventually reaching a point where components no longer work at all. Citing the Windows Registry as an advantage most particularly demonstrates that this article is biased, as it is the complexity and undocumented nature of the Registry that causes most Windows problems. Turn a novice user (which this article seems to be aimed at) loose with the registry editor for a few hours and see if you don't have to do a fresh install.

In my case, I had a "small" 4 gig partition for my Windows 2000 "legacy" system. Since I had not booted it in so long I decided to get fresh anti-virus, Windows updates, etc before running the test that was my ultimate goal. Before doing all of this about two thirds of that partition were used with software alone, no applications other than the Mozilla browser and AVG anti-virus. After running the Windows update however, the partition is almost full. That's 4G, for Windows and two relatively small applications. One has to wonder what Microsoft is doing with all that space. I'm sure glad I don't use Windows any more. Hopefully more of my friends will be jumping ship soon.

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