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Is XP really that good?

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nontroppo:
I've seen three cases where a machine was hosed due to registry corruption, one machine was fixed by hacking around in the recovery console:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

The user of the second was smart enough to run ERUNT on a regular schedule and ran an alternative OS to make recovery trivial (XP running bootcamped on my macbook  8))

But a third was truly hosed, system restore was useless and several days work was interrupted as that machine was rehabilitated. Google suggests these are not isolated incidences. My experience is that a monolithic store, even with XPs attempts at integrity maintainence, is certainly flawed.

f0dder:
Weird.

I haven't seen a hosed registry since then Win9x days - neither on any of my own machines, or machines I've been managing (the museum, friends, family, ...). This amounts to 20+ machines (and more if you count replaced hardware), and some of them have been through a lot of abuse, as well as malware, hardware failures, de-synched RAIDs (stripes as well as mirrors), et cetera. On my own systems, it includes getting BSODs during driver development with unflushed filesystem caches (which *has* hosed a system now and then, but never with registry failure).

So I wonder, what do people do to get a corrupted registry? Note that invalid driver configuration doesn't count, as that would leave a system hosed no matter where system configuration is stored and isn't registry-specific.

iphigenie:
This sounds like one of those discussions where someone hasn't used Linux for more than ten minutes in the past year, but knows in detail how bad it is. In other words, it's not true to my experience
-zridling (November 30, 2008, 03:23 AM)
--- End quote ---

This would have been a very commendable attitude if it wasn't followed by a list that is more religious belief than truth - made me want to rant, which i did elsewhere

The point of this thread was a very open minded discussion saying "oh, windows XP works pretty well"

My take on this is simple: it works pretty well because it is old. It has been here for years and as a result
- the current hardware is overpowered for it (my first xp machine had 256M of ram and it did really well on it)
- annoyances have been ironed out
- it is easy for hardware makers to have decent drivers
- but it also has accumulated a huge collection of generic drivers
- there has been time for freeware to emerge for all the annoyances that are linked to taste (= things which annoy a subset of people)
- software that was written years ago still works
- most people have used it enough (even if only on other people's machines) that it is universally familiar (this is the bit that linux alas cannot beat)

This all creates a pretty nice and tight package, and a success on the scale that makes the original hype campaign for XP (I was an OS/2 person back then, i hated that campaign full of misinformation) actually not ridiculous at all...

I have always preferred another OS to tinker with or develop on, but throughout it all I have always had my day to day desktop machines as windows, especially at home. Granted it mostly was because of certain pieces of software and games. But I guess I am typical.

You get the same effect if you use an older version of linux (do patch the libraries, though), without the newer, less stable bells and whistles.

It takes time to become efficient

zridling:
[iphigenie]: This would have been a very commendable attitude if it wasn't followed by a list that is more religious belief than truth - made me want to rant, which i did elsewhere.
--- End quote ---

Methinks you protest too much. I did acknowledge XP's utility, however, where exactly is the untruth and "religious belief" in my response to "For your normal user, there is little reason not to run Windows"? (emphasis mine)

No big deal. I disagreed and gave 11 specific reasons based on my experience with Linux as a reasonable alternative to Windows. I used Microsoft OSes from 1985-2007. I have definitely earned -- not to mention paid for -- the right to try something different. God forbid it should turn out to be fortunate in every way.

nontroppo:
So I wonder, what do people do to get a corrupted registry? Note that invalid driver configuration doesn't count, as that would leave a system hosed no matter where system configuration is stored and isn't registry-specific.
-f0dder (December 09, 2008, 01:10 AM)
--- End quote ---

Well beats me. The owner of the hosed system is a true computer conservative, she runs stuff that she was comfortable from her DOS days (wordperfect > word), she was definitely not a tinkerer in any sense. She runs eudora and netscape, never opens attachments from mail, never wants to try new software, *never* would run a beta, doesnt install service packs/updates until she knows no one else had issues. And yet when we were days away from a crucial deadline (computers seem to sense it!); boom.

My corruption was also not clearly attributable to anything, though I do test lots of software, and am a private alpha tester for several things, so I'm more vulnerable (I'd have to edit registry values sometimes). ErunNT was the only registry-type software I'd run, can't really see how that could cause failure.

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