Here is my windows experience for the last 20+ years? Since Windows 3.0.
Maybe with enough other people voicing their experiences we can get something that is solid and where a large part of the work experience is not working to get the tool… ‘windows’ to work. Rather we can focus on the reason we use the computer in the first place, to accomplish a job or function. Here is my view of the Windows Experience.
Windows V7 has a lot of good presentation appeal. But I would rather have the entire windows appearance as attractive as a close-up of Fidel’s beard after he ate a crumble cookie… if I could just get out of the usual window experience.
Which is… lockup and die, restore, reboot, app failure, web search for solutions, patch, reboot, oops something else quit. Revert to an older restore point, loose all the program settings within the app’s for the last week, re-install, work, ooops app terminating, send Microsoft a message, get back a message from Microsoft, driver problem, update, different apps stop working, restore to a known good starting point, re-install all the app’s since then, work,… application is terminating, windows has detected a non recoverable error, restore… Windows downloads part of a service pack in the dead of night… oops system won’t boot, restore to known good starting point… ie just after original base license install but before anything else installed. Phone MS support… we will help you for 49.95$ and promise to fix your problem, … 3 days later… your problem needs the professional support line for $295 because you have a raid disk… we are refunding your $49.95 … would you like to be transferred to professional support?
How about some reliability and the novel concept of a working product. I have worked with dos since version 3 and every version of windows and NT since then and they are consistently the same. Marketing and no substance. If there were an alternative I would take it. In 15 years of working with VMS (DEC’s OS) we never had one crash and that was in a real time many tiered system. Dave Cutler was the principle architect of VMS and went to Microsoft to do NT… something went really wrong somewhere.