George Toft wrote:
SJ Black wrote:
UM, I really must agree.
The only thing was to ask what percentage would you give M$ to be desktop ready. Splitting Operating System Stability and User Approved Application I give the following.
System 10% Application 90%
Personal opinion, or professional opinion?
I'd give about 2% for the system itself, maybe 60% for their apps. That's professionally. Personally, i don't think either is what you call "ready for prime time", but there's been enough marketing to convince people that prime time is moot when EVERYBODY'S DOIN' IT...
Alpha
Here's a real-life Windows NT scenario (nightmare) I just lived: Re-installed WinNT 4.0 on a machine with a crashed OS. The goal was to have NT 4.0 SP5 and IE5 running. After installation of the OS, I ran the IE5 Setup - it said service pack 3 must be installed. Fired up the IE that came with it (3.02?) and surfed to www.microsoft.com to get SP5, which gave me a "Permission Denied. You don't have permission to access that virtual directory." So much for getting SP5 from their web site. Forget downloading Netscape to get SP5 - IE3 won't download any files over 12MB. Catch 22!
I downloaded Opera (it is fast!) and used it to grab SP5. Installed SP5, and went to install IE5. IE5 setup told me it could not uninstall once I began. I acknowledged. It got to 43% and gave me this message: "Setup cannot continue. OK HELP" I clicked on Help, and it said "You appear to have all of the files installed properly. Set up cannot install Internet Explorer. Please call Microsoft technical support. OK" And it was right - it could not be uninstalled. After every reboot, it tries to continue IE5 installation, and bombs out at 43%.
I agree totally with this thread: Microsoft's OS is not ready for prime time. Like I prattled on before, in my office of 25 Windows users, only four could install the OS.
Poor George ;-) Why did you expect anything else? This is standard! I had lot's of storys like that to add, like going round in circles like "xxx is not propely installed, run setup. running setup tells me it's perfectly installed. running deinstall tells me that xxx cannnot be deinstalled..., realy funny ;-)) Or, to make sure I deinstalled IE4 prior to install 5.0. Bad idea. lost most of NT as well. We use a program that -as we recently discovered- moves some office dll's to another place. If you deinstall it, it's "goodby office" time too. But repairing is not easy for some other reason. There is t-online, the german telecom ISP. They have a properitary software that replaces -I think winsock32.dll- on startup and puts it back after closing, unless it's used by any other application. I installed (for a begging friend) netscape 4.X, that came with some realplayer or goodness knows what. This program "gripped" winsock32.dll and as a result I either couldn't connect to the internet nor go home. ;-) After a few HOURS of research, I learned the winsock bit the hard way. Meanwhile, I merely REFUSE to touch windows systems, for just these reasons. The system is bad because it allows everyone to do everything, replacing libs, moving libs. I do not mind touching linux systems, the risk of "unexpected behaviour" is much much lower and usually reverseable. Well, for beeing "ready for the desktop", I see linux on the edge to it; it is for some, but not the majority. There are still apps. missing, or the choise is very limited. Undoubtly, linux is catching up. Juergen -- =========================================== __ _ Juergen Braukmann juergen.braukmann@gmx.de| -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Tel: 0201-743648 dk4jb@db0qs.#nrw.deu.eu | /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ===========================================_\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/