To Mac Users: How Badly Does Windows Suck?
I got my scanner working this morning. It took many hours and a couple of dozen reboots. Which raises the question: Just how badly does Windows suck? I mean this as a real question.
The scanner — an Epson Perfection 1240U — had worked fine under Windows 2000. It worked fine when I upgraded to Windows XP. And then it stopped working in a blaze of random weirdness: the scanner control panel would start up when I pressed the Start button on the scanner, but then the system would claim that it couldn’t find the scanner. Or, the XP dialogue asking how to deal with a data file it’s found would list the scanner twice but neither would work.
So, I did the usual Windows things. I downloaded the new TWAIN driver and app software from Epson. (Note to Epson: Your explanation of which files to download definitely sucks.) I installed them. I uninstalled everything. I started from scratch. I changed the order in which I installed the various scanner-related apps. I uninstalled and plugged the scanner in to enable Windows to find it and prompt me to do the installs. At every turn I ran the upgrade/patch software, rebooting between every encounter.
This morning I edited the registry, taking out every reference to Epson I could find. Then I went through the reboot-install-reboot-patch-reboot sequence. And the scanner works! At least for now.
With XP, there’s less of this time-stealing crap than ever. Remember how hard it was to install a scanner in the old days? But it still happens, and I’m not sure who to be pissed at. After all, Windows is dealing with an extremely complex environment. Assuming we want the maximum openness to peripherals and apps, is XP under-performing, performing, or over-performing? I know the Epson apps are not very robust — their preferred way of handling errors is to put up a dinging error message once a second until you reboot your machine — so perhaps the blame goes to Epson. And although the Registry is more fragile than any of us would like, the fact that a foolhardy user like me can hand edit it I count as a plus. But perhaps I shouldn’t.
I know we all enjoy being pissed at Microsoft, but let’s be honest. The last time I was a serious Unix user, installing apps took a systems administrator, and the OS was far from crash free. And I’ve watched Linux hackers tear their hair out trying to install a peripheral. Granted, they have the comfort of knowing that there’s a community that can make it better, but Linux isn’t free of experiences like my Epson battle. Is the Mac? OS X? Are these the inevitable difficulties of dealing with systems perpetually at the limit of their ability to manage complexity, and/or does Windows just plain suck?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
please post more comments, I will visit this site again
I am a big pc user, right now i am on a mac at school and i really cant stand it to tell you the truth. I find that it takes a lot longer time to make documents becuase there are no toolbars. Plus i am i WinXP user and all my hardware has just pluged in and worked, and i have alot of stuff everything from extrenal HD to the cheapest mp3 player. As long as you have the data cd that came with the hardware it should work fine. Plus macs shouldnt have the hardware problems of the PC for macs hardly have any aftermarket hardware. Most hardware for macs is made by mac and at that is very hard to find software and hardware for it. since your local best buy doesnt carry it. also how the hell can you upgrade an imac there pretty much a throw away machine i think.
There is less aftermarket hardware for Macs, but there is a lot more than Adam seems to realise… Also, Adam, I find toolbars’ icons confusing, but most recent Mac programs I’ve seen have toolbars. Mac OS X even has that little “pill” button on the top right of the window to hide/show the toolbar for you. (If Apple’s own programs would only use this button…)
I was struggling with the ‘waiting for network initialization’ thing last night. It took me about fifteen minutes (including a few restarts) to resolve. It’s probably *way* too late for ralph now, but my problem was caused when I added an AirPort card to my system. The solution was to start up the System Preferences, turn off all network ports in Network, apply, quit System Preferences, and then bring up System Preferences again and turn on the ports that I wanted.
As for the suckiness of Mac OS X, I’d have to agree with ralph: all computers suck. I find it much easier to track down an application’s or other preference file in Mac OS X then to track down all vestiges of an application’s registry entries, but maybe that’s just me.
The worst XP story I have is when my PC at work decided not to recognise my USB devices, which happened to include my keyboard and mouse. I spent hours on it, rebooting many times, shuffling cables around, with no success. Fortunately I had a VNC server running, so that I could connect remotely, and risk an OS upgrade. Something in the latest XP patch fixed the USB and I was back up and running.
The same thing happened after I reassembled my Mac last night after installing the AirPort card. In this case, the solution was to unplug and replug the keyboard. No rebooting required.
system restore
This is an interesting conversation to be sure. I’ve been in the UNIX industry for 17 years (worked 10 of those for the now long-gone Pyramid Technology Corp. OSx “Dual Universe” UNIX). I’ve been a Mac user since about 1990 and have lived through the years of progression of the old Mac OS … lamenting unprotected memory, rejoicing at every OS release that added functionality and reliability.
I absolutely hated Windows 3 … stayed as far away as possible. I found NT 4.0 to be just as bad from a user’s perspective. Windows 95 … looked more like the Mac … but totally painful to deal with from a laptop/transient hardware perspective. Win 98 … much better device P&P support. Windows 2000 was probably the best thing to come out of Redmond to date. XP is more 2000 with gummi bear icons … seems very stable and has a lot of very nice features from an admin/user perspective.
With OS X (10.2.6) I am in heaven. I have Apple’s rootless X11 server, terminal/bash at my fingertips, bluetooth, built-in 802.11, and Rendezvous (zeroconf) is all added together to be a virtually endless source of joy and productivity for me (as I sit on my back patio with my TiBook … supervising the swimming kiddies).
As an old UNIX hack and an old Apple junkie, Jaguar (10.2) is a dream. 10.0 and 10.1 were a little problematic for me at times; Norton Antivirus corrupted my system and I abandoned it … which has been the case for most configuration problems, third party software run amok.
LDAP/WebDAV support, VirtualPC, X11, darwin & bash all let me use my (personal) Powerbook in a Windows/UNIX business environment with a lot of joy and no headaches, and my co-workers are absolutely envious … as they futz with Cygwin (which I love) and LINUX on Vmware, just to get the built-in UNIX world I can reach out and touch without hassle.
I can’t wait for Panther.
Oh … and as far as scanners and peripheral equipment with OS X, I’ve got an external firewire CD-R drive, a “Windows” SCSI PCI card, “Windows” bluetooth dongles (on my B&W tower and Powerbook), a Canon scanner, and use my desktop Mac for a lot of digital photo work (Nikon cameras), and I’ve been happily plug-and-play with them. The only exception to all of my cloudless happiness with OS X, was when the support for the first-gen firewire hardware in my B&W mysteriously went away in 10.2.3 — which I ultimately fixed with an off-the-shelf firewire + USB 2.0 PCI card ($35).
I don’t hate Microsoft, but I LOVE Apple!
C-c-c-changes
David Weinberger wants to know: How Badly Does Windows Suck? Let me count the ways…….
Mac OS 9 was never a good OS for tinkering, very limited software and options, with no ability to multi-task. To me OS X is not only a huge leap in functionality, but in tweakability, stability, can multi-task extremely well, good looks, and alot more software. Mac OS X feels as if it has this layer of ease of use, wether you want to go past that layer to tweak your system manually is completely up to you. There are many command line tweaks system tweaks or utilities for OS X, makes things fun for the experimental type.
Any how back to the topic, for one i think windows experiences random failures because of the massive amount of spyware and virii infecting the WWW. Theres always the possibility it was the 3rd party driver that screwed up, perhaps a prefs file or configuration file went corrupt. Also depending on how you treat your System can greatly effect how things work too. My friend had a PC for a month and he infected it with hundreds of virii and spyware, he downloaded lots of stuff thru kazaa….. Also having to many things installed can effect your system too, slow it down and maybe interfer with other programs or drivers at the same time.
My point is there is less of a chance for failures on a Mac. Main reason is because there are almost no harmful virii for Mac os. I download lots of stuff thru p2p applications and have had no virus threats in all my years of using a mac, 7 years to be exact.
with xp, i installed my scanner by plugging it in, windows had some sort of automatic driver install and it works fine.
iv heard lots about macs being easier, but then your stuck with using mac everything, you have to get a mac scanner, or a mac video car, a mac sound card, and forget upgrading.
and thats basically why using a mac is easer, the company has compleat control over what you use.
personally, iv tryed win95, win98, winXP, red hat linux, and i find windows XP to be the best.
You don’t need a “mac scanner, or a mac video car, a mac sound card” Everything that fits industries standart should work perfectly with OS Ten. For me tought.
Honestly you guys, if you dont have dial up, should check out this site
http://www.wimp.com/macs
And then you’ll understand why macs SUCK
How bad does windows suck? Well I guess you’d have to own a Mac to find out.
Everyone knows that Macs are for the rich, and PCs are for the poor.
Granted I’m finding this site over a year later than the post I’m responding to; machater (as if the name doesn’t scream bias) you need to learn the meaning of tongue-in cheek. If macs couldn’t do video editing much better than a machine running windows than most, if not all, film studios would not use them to make movies, yeah look into it, cuz i’m talking major hollywood studios not little indy film companies. my 2 cents: I hated using computers (which happened to be all windows os) until I started college where I majored in art, the art department had a lab full of g4 powermacs up until a year and a half ago when they got all new g5s running panther, and then i bought my newest computer, a powerbook running tiger, and i learned how very simple accomplishing meaningful work could be. for the record i know computers, hardware and software, for any os, much better than your average user, though i claim to be no technical wizard, but if you want to insist that microsoft is the center of the computing world I can only feel sorry for how much of your time and energy you are wasting making a poor OS function. For the people who query why pc’s are more popular, use your heads for a minute, microsoft does NOT make hardware just software, apple makes hardware with software that will only run on that hardware, there are a plethora of hardware companies making machines to run windows allowing more competition and lower prices between them while apple hardware remains at a fairly fixed price and the only option to run that software. It’s simple economics, you can’t make the blanket statement that pc’s are more popular because there are more machines running windows, many of the companies producing that hardware do not have a market share incredibly larger than apple, except for the big names like dell, and if anyone here wants to claim that dell makes awesome high quality products feel free because i know most knowledgeable pc users will argue against that (even most unknowledgeable ones). You can call me a macaddict or whatever the term is for someone that just claims macs are better for whatever reason, but unless you want to just play games on your machine instead of actually accomplishing something or are a robotic corporate office that just purchased pc’s because they got a massive discount or don’t know any better, then you would be wise to just consider the mac os as an option, I know many of my pc using friends have been looking in to macs since they have seen mine and it hasn’t been b/c of my “brainwashed cult preachings.” I will use macs until something better comes along and for the record you die-hard windows fans better thank apple for one reason alone, if it weren’t for them your precious security-flawed clone of an OS would not be what it is today
THE SECRET MULTITASKING LIMITATION OF WINDOWS XP
WindblowsXP sucks more than you can imagine! Get a load of this!
WindowsXP is the joke of modern operating systems because it is only able to run a very limited number of programs at once. If you freshly boot XP, no matter how much RAM you have, you will only be able to open about 54 IE or Explorer windows before you won’t be able to open anymore. If you open about 3 major programs like photoshop, Eudora, etc. you will then only be able to open a few more windows before you reach the “resource” limit. You will still have plenty of RAM, and the swap file won’t be big–simply, Windows XP has the same limitation as Windows 98–limited resources. Maybe the kernel doesn’t but the “windows xp overlay” does. On OSX you can open hundreds or thousands of windows with no problems at all.
Microsoft is a retarded company and their products seriously suck. That’s why no graphics/publishing professionals use Windows. It’s good for a casual user who just wants to write an email, maybe take a look at some website. As soon as you need to do some serious work on it, like open a bunch of web browser windows, edit some photos, work with your email, etc. you’d be wondering why at some point nothing works anymore, and you are forced to close some of your windows.
This is not a real “multitasking” operating system, but a joke on consumers. It’s amazing that I couldn’t find any report of this serious limitation! I posted on a techie board and people just laughed at me–the don’t want to admit it. I had a hard time believing the limitation when I found it. I wonder if Vista will still have the same limitation. I challenge anyone to try this! I experience this problem DAILY, and I have replicated it on a brand new machine.
I have used windows since 1995, and at this point I have decided that if I ever want to use a “REAL COMPUTER” I will have to use OSX. I am recommending to everyone who asks me now, to buy one of the new Intel Macs…
Tek.
P.S. Another “feature” of WindowsXP is that I noticed that sometimes, if you have a large file, like 300 MB or more, like a movie file in a folder, when you go to look at the folder in Windows Explorer, Explorer will crash and restart immediately–even if you are just seeing the file listed (not trying to see a “thumbnail” or anything. The basic objective of an operating system is to be able to manage files–even that doesn’t work 100% reliably! Viewing the file from within another “browser” like WinRAR for example, there is no crash… Microsoft SUCKS.
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