Just a point

[Instar]

You know, its kind of annoying for me to listen to people complaining about their computers crashing, and how Windows sucks and computers shouldnt crash like they do. Well, I just have to use my knowledge of computers, well, ok, Im just venting.
The computer and operating system must keep track of the system's memory. The average computer has around 64 or 32 megabytes of memory. Thats not too much, right? Well, each meg has 1024 kilobytes. Then, on top of that, each kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and each byte is eight bits. Each bit is physically one capacitor in RAM. Lets do some math here (which some people don't know a thing about): 64*1024*1024*8=536870912. Whenever any one of those bits fail, it could crash the machine. I'd like to see a person take care of 536870912 things, without fail, all the frickin time.
And then people complain when they break their computers (and yet it is the computer's fault, or microsoft's fault). Case in point, a guy who owns his own computer business repairs, reformats, etc each one of his 6 computers once a year. He has to fix this other person's computer every two or three weeks. I wonder why. People idiotically download viruses, tweak settings they shouldnt touch, use unstable software, and other dumb things. Its the person's fault about 95% of the time, I think.
And whenever someone says that windows sucks, or maybe microsoft is terrible, I just have to remind them that windows is a very large program, with probably millions of lines of software, any one of which could cause problems. I would like to see some of these idiots write a million line program without one bug. And sometimes, its not windows' fault either, when you run conflicting buggy programs.

And Macs just suck, sorry.

[capnq]

OTOH, a better designed OS would be more fault-tolerant. You ever notice how almost every EULA in consumer software has a disclaimer about it not being suitable for "mission-critical" applications? The software used in such applications is nearly unbreakable, but it's also much more expensive, because it's been rigorously tested.

It's the old "fast, cheap, good: pick two" problem; too many software companies pick fast and cheap, and let the marketing department dictate the release schedule without any regard for any technical problems that the development team runs into.

[Instar]

You're right, a better OS is more fault tolerant. WinXP does not crash if a program thats running screws up big time. WinXP can even detect registry conflicts between two programs before installing software, which I think is incredible.
I still think that there must be someone out there who would be able of crashing XP though, I mean, stupidity is an infinite resource. Oh well

[Atilla the Pun]

Actually, each bit is about 5 or 7 transistors, I can't remember which. The circuit for one bit is called a J/K flip-flop.

And 256 megs RAM seems to make Windows 98SE mostly stable.

AtP

[Richard]

I can answer this question. Windows is a fine home OS, the problem Microsoft got into with many IT folks is when they brought out NT (which is mostly stolen VMS and Unix stuff anyway) and "claimed" it was an enterprise level OS.

The problem is NT is a joke for running a server on. It isn't stable, it doesn't handle memory well, and I could go on and on.....

[Jmenschenfresser]

NT....errrrr.....NT.....errrrrr!!!!

Was running 4.0 and I cried in my sleep nightly because I was rebooting twice a day.

Now have 2000 profi, and it seems a bit better.

Emphasis on "seems."