I generally find Verity Stob pretty over-the-top, but she didn’t have to exaggerate this one much, if at all. It’s an old one, but it had me smiling and nodding because I’ve seen more than my fair share of Windows machines with nearly every one of the symptoms she mentions. Far too often they’ve been my machines, too.
And the problems aren’t completely fixed yet. Just a couple weeks ago, I had to deal with a relative’s Vista machine, which couldn’t open half of its Control Panel pages for some reason. It didn’t look like it had malware either, that was all Windows. Things have gotten better though… a decade ago, I used to have to reinstall Windows every six months or so, now it’s up to nearly a year and a half.
Linux, in my experience, has been a lot more stable.
Vista is beta quality, at best, even SP1 was as flaky as can be and regularly parts of the system, even without malware, worked only some of the time. Windows 7 is a little better, maybe release-candidate quality. (I’m of course talking about the release, not the RC itself, which was about the same thing. 😛 )
Linux used to have some buggy applications in the distributions, but it’s been getting a lot more polished and if something was wrong with a GUI front-end you could always go to the command line and do the same thing. The Vista control panel in your example has no such option. 🙂
I haven’t spent enough time with Win7 to know how buggy it might be, yet. And given a choice, I never will. 😉
I’ve seen lots of buggy Linux applications, but so far none of them have damaged the OS itself. So far as I can tell, anyway… I still don’t know what caused the worst problem I’ve seen with it, the one that prompted me to reinstall it last week: every time I logged in, it started eating 100% CPU. If I logged out, it stopped, and logging in under any other account didn’t trigger the problem. But the worst part was, nothing appeared to be running. According to everything I tried, the CPU power wasn’t being used by any process. It was just vanishing, going nowhere. Copying my user data to a new account caused the problem to appear on the new account too — but deleting all of the data did not remove the problem, from either one. I still have no idea what could have caused it.
In any case, reinstalling Linux is far, far easier than reinstalling Windows. After installing the basic OS, I have a fairly up-to-date list of the packages that I need to install, and a single command will install and set up all but two of them. All my personal data is in one place, so pulling it to the new installation is just as easy (and I was able to leave the problem behind by leaving almost all of the “hidden” directories behind, though that has never been needed before). Then there are one or two system configuration files to reload from my backups, and I’m pretty much done. Elapsed time: four to six hours tops, and I’ve got a new and fully-patched system with at least 99% of the functionality of my previous installation, and have left any problems behind. And most of the process can be left unattended.
With Windows, on the other hand, I have to dig up and install each program separately, including several that are on physical CDs, and almost all of them require manually clicking through installation programs and possibly entering information — no unattended installations there. My data is scattered all over hell’s half-acre (or it was with XP and earlier versions, Win7 is supposed to make things easier in that respect), ensuring that my backups always missed something. And backing up configuration settings is all but impossible because they’re stored in the registry rather than in separate files, and the registry contains a lot of stuff that can’t safely be moved to a new installation. Time required: eight hours to get a minimally-working setup (e-mail, browser, compiler, and my working set of tools), followed by two or three days of tripping over things that still needed to be installed or configured.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that I prefer to do most of my work, and keep almost all of my data, under Linux.
(I haven’t had to reinstall OS X yet, but assuming the Time Machine backup program works as advertised, that should be the easiest one of all.)
Yeah, OS X is the easiest to reinstall, and not only that it has several reinstall options; including ones that save your old programs and data in a separate tree (if you don’t have Time Machine that’s saved it for you) and ones that allow you to reinstall just the OS. OS X is a very productive environment because of that, and many other features. 🙂
Nice. But you’ll excuse me if I hope I never have to reinstall any OS again. (Hope springs eternal, no matter how vain a hope it is.) 😉
Which operating system for a computer (note the qualification, I never had to reinstall PalmOS 😉 ) do you suggest that you never have to reinstall? Maybe I should run it. 😉
Hmmm, of course, the huge uptimes for some FreeBSD systems might suggest this, but that operating system made a pact with the devil which helps explain it. >;-)
I never had to reinstall the OS on my TI-99/4a. Or my Sinclair QL. 😉
Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever having to reinstall OS/2 either. But despite its technical excellence, even a pact with the devil wouldn’t have helped that one.