re: Question about 'What's the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP?'
Thursday, November 20, 2003 at 5:45 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Svenne B
(4 messages posted)
Hi Alan !! You are damned right about xp instability, I have installed several xp
macchines the latest months and its quite a scary business to make them run smoothly.
I have been succesful on all my attempts but it requires expert knowledge to get
it run on other than newly bought off the shelf machines.
Even on such machines may the xp malfunction though they are brand new, forget the
support agreement w the seller, they dont know shit not even a single bit ! I agree
that w2000 is lot better, it has so many nice features like setting exact user rights
on every exe. And its very stable to say the least. Xp has most of w2000 features
but they are way out and very deeply hidden somewhere in the Marianer Trench in the
South Pacific.
First i think msoft has to get rid of the driver thinking. Its so messy with all
these drivers for different hardware. Msoft must push much harder on the h-ware suppliers
for "driverless" configs and h-ware. Only one generic super-driver for graphic one
for sound etc.
Msoft will kill themselves if they continue to make their os's larger and having
an unacceptably complex inner structure. A normal installation of winxp lists almost
10 000 (!!!) files in the \Windows\ directory. Thats at least 100 times too much.
The burden of administration of all thes dlls and suspicios files and unwanted side
effects willl drown any attempt to make a better os. A serious cleanup is a way out
of it. The Linux approach to compile a specific kernel for a specific config is very
good and straightforward.
To sell such an complicated os like xp w-out a very good background defragmenter,
built in antivirus support, w-out a write protected \sysroot\ ( = \WINDOWS\) directory,
w-out a flawless and brickhard firewall, w-out the possibility to load a small, smoothly
running tiny xp, except the lousy recovery console, thats long ago outdated, is horrific
I think.
And XP is way too expensive, cause the support arent of much use. Also a background
backup utility thats turned on by default is needed. The os's backup is much too
weak and glitchy.
No ordinary program installation should be able to change anything in the sys directories.
The layer thinking of building os's arent ideas adopted by msoft , its lots of spaghetti
code and spaghetti structure of the whole os.
Another example the Windows Update should be able to run as a standalone app on a
target machine w-out netw access. Then download all necessary stuff on another protected
machine, and the updates transferred as a single packed file to the target machine.
I tried to use Windows Update 2 weeks ago getting patches and during downloading
the blaster virus struck that newly installed machine, oh gosh what a crappy result
it was !! What a mess !! Had to start from the beginning again.... 2 hours lost.
So msoft have to figure out another way of acessing w update, why not open a single
channel to the update site much like accessing an BBS in the old days through an
analog modem ? Or using only encrypted transfer not accepting anything else during
update. On a freshly installed machine, the firewall should be turned on by default,
the machine logs on directly to windows update and get the patches immediately. The
firewall should block anything but the windows update ip packets, encrypted of course.
The large amount of small dlls cause the system to be slow, since it causes the memory
handler to have to work harder than expected, swapping pages and defragmenting RAM
memory. Get rid of most of the standard dlls and build a single much larger dll,
or incorporate them in the os !
If they still want to use all the nitty gritty messy spaghetti structures then they
have to create a virtual windows machine w a virtual \windows\ directory for each
app, so each badly designed app can fool around as much around in the virtual machine
it wants and screwing up the virtual \windows directory but not disturbing anything
on the ground level.
NT based systems such as xp is designed w a "virtual" windows machine in mind, but
its only temporarly, not in the file system level.
I see xp as a great waste of programming effort. From my point of view and my experiences
w earlier windows os's I dont think the follower Longhorn will be much better, it
will be even more complicated. Msoft have that problem, that they are more for doing
new things and features and use to much effort on that than to reconstruct and rebuild
the old stuff so it will run much better and safer.
Remember that these os's are descendants of the 386 protected mode memory model,
and they are still using it though its long ago outdated. At that time it was common
that an 386 had not more than 8 mb of ram, and maybe an 200 MB hard drive. More efficient
protection mechanisms than that model can be designed and adopted.
We that are pros want os's that runs for weeks or months continously w-out ever going
down or even any speed loss, or misuse of ram or resources.
// Svenne B
On Saturday, July 20, 2002 at 8:00 am, Allan wrote:
>I bought a computer from HP (P4-1.8GHz) preloaded with WinXP. I've been using Win2000Pro
>for ages on a P1-MMX laptop, a P2 laptop, and a P3 desktop, (all worked properly,
>so i was terribly impressed with Microsoft) and the switch to WinXP seemed exciting
>at the time. It was exciting, if you consider Blue Screens of Death exciting.
Wrong,
>if you consider working software without bugs, hardware compatible with the OS,
software,
>and other hardware, and actual end results exciting. WinXP can't do any of this.
>
>Second Edition WinXP? Hmm. Worth a try. I agree - get it right the first time.
> WinXP is built on Win2000 / WinNT technology? Then why doesn't it work?
>
>Networking? Separating users (students rooming here need passwords, security, access
>only to their own files, etc.) doesn't seem possible with WinXP. How come?
>
>Firewall? It said i had to buy one after a "trial period" was over. That's not
>a firewall. That's a sample.
>
>MovieMaker? WinXP didn't recognize my TV card for video input.
>
>Antivirus? I was told it had one. Not sure. But it sure didn't like my Norton
>running.
>
>Sorry - just frustration here. I want reliability, not Tonka-Toy features that
don't
>work. Speed is sacrificed to graphics, stability to new features, and security
to
>connectivity. I reformatted my hard disks and put Win2000Pro on my new computer.
> Advice to anyone trying to decide - don't touch WinXP. It's utter crap.
>
>Allan
>allansplaceca@yahoo.ca
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