[cryptodan]

imajeff,



I do not know what your users do to their Windows machines, but my computers at home that run Windows XP offer me the same reliablity and stability as any linux or unix distro out there. So please get off your "I hate Windows, and Linux is more elite attitude". I have worked on various Windows boxes, and have owned many of them and guess what all of them have had zero issues, zero bsods, and they ran ptograms flawlessly. Much like programs on your precious linux flavors. I have also worked in organizations where windows machines ran extremely stable and yes this is Windows 2000 to Windows XP Pro. You want to know where the issue lies with Windows and the so called ease of exploitation lies? Here is a brief wake up call, the issue is with the users of the computers, and their ignorant web browsing practices. So please go educate yourself on better IT practices and policy and quit touting linux superiority.



Thanks,

Dan

[Evildave]

Quote

I have worked on various Windows boxes, and have owned many of them and guess what all of them have had zero issues, zero bsods, and they ran ptograms flawlessly. Much like programs on your precious linux flavors.

LOL! :)

Everything's nice and stable like Linux.

I love an admission like that.

No the Microsoft party line is that Linux never works, and every application sucks. You're supposed to claim that nothing works, and nothing's available for Linux, then proclaim what great games you can run on your Windows PC, and how it's WAY better than the other game consoles.

[cryptodan]

Evildave,



Actually in my case it is quite true. I can go days without rebooting my windows machine same as I did with any *nix box I have ever owned. People who say windows sucks and is unstable and lacks a certain degree of reliablity are quiet very ignorant and quite very immature and joins "I love <enter current distro of the month here> or the infamous windows sucks because of <enter ignorant and illogical reason here>" bandwagon <----------this changes on a weekly basis. Then there are those console fanbois who really irritate me and drive me up a wall. I really wished the Linux/Unix community was actually mature and acted like grown ups instead of whiney cry babies that you all are.

The only ever and quite honest complaint I have ever had about Microsoft was Windows ME, and they rectified that issue by dropping the product and giving us Windows XP. So please go troll the linux faqs forums, the sony PS3 forums, and the XBox 360 forums for I am quite confident that you will find a crowd that will induldge in your ignorance that you have portrayed here.

I only compare my Windows stability to Linux Stability so that you linux fanbois/zealots will actually comprehend what I am saying, because you give the Open Source community a very bad name and you all leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[MarioJP]

Same here. I mostly leave my pc all the time. Never have i seen windows crashing. And my system is Overclocked too lol. Only time it freezes on me is when my video card overheats which is due to the fan not speeding up when its suppose to, which i fixed that by manually adjusting it at a fixed speed.

[foolishfish]

cryptodan said:

I only compare my Windows stability to Linux Stability so that you linux fanbois/zealots will actually comprehend...

Comprehend what? that as long as Microsoft allows 3rd parties to patch the kernel instead of running in userland, that windows will NEVER be as stable as *nix?

Xp is ok, i leave it up and running for a week or two at a time without rebooting, Vista x64 is even more so in that i can leave it running for 25 or 30 days without issue.

Neither is like my SuSE boxen that run for months on end without reboot.

[Evildave]

OMFG!

You tell us you leave your computer on 24/7 on EARTH DAY?

You do realize that besides the negative impact on global pollution, you're spending around $200 a year to leave each PC running while you sleep and it just sits there?

200W 24H $0.11/KWH 1/1000 365 = $192.72

Turn it off, or Captain Planet will come around with a big can of whoop-ass.

[cryptodan]

Actually it just doesn't sit there it is also a file server in my house that my wife uses to dump her photoshop and paintshop pro work too as well a media library of our entire CD Collection which has a server running along with storage for my sons pictures and movies. Oh and your energy cost consumptions probably doesn't pertain to me, because each state and city has their own charging method.

I really don't care about Earth Day and the whole jazz about saving it. Earth is full of idiots and ignorant people who want to cure every disease and stop killing so that the earth becomes so heavily populated that we began to resort to cannibalism and eat each other and our pets.

The only reason I drive an economical car is to save money at the pump so I can pump that saved money into more computers.

[Evildave]

So why not have the computer shut down or at least go to sleep after a certain amount of inactivity or after a certain hour and either wake on a schedule or wake on LAN activity? Unless your machine's a dinosaur, the settings for 'WAKE ON LAN' that should be in its BIOS. I somehow doubt your wife is doing much work after 2:00am. She probably doesn't even do work every day. If the computer is only 'sleeping', it will wake almost instantly.

However, your internet router/MODEM needs its firewall configured to keep port scanners on the internet from pinging your computer awake all the time.

You'd save enough money on electricity to pay for more hardware. It'll also save wear and tear on your UPS batteries if you have power faults while you sleep.

You could also switch your server over to an old notebook PC. That'll consume 1/5 to 1/10 the power of a desktop PC. Get yourself a 'big' 250GB 2.5" drive and stuff it in the computer, or an even bigger external drive that is also capable of spindown.

You could ante up just a couple hundred bucks on a NAS appliance. That'll make the drives available for little more than the power to keep the drives spinning, and you won't be putting wear & tear on all the parts of your main PC. Several of them also support the ability to 'spin down' the drives according to your preferences. Spinning the drives down is important, as your typical consumer model drives will self-destruct if left running all the time, which is more than a little expensive.
http://www.dansdata.com/gz060.htm

[cryptodan]

LOL, now I know EvilDave lacks the experience needed to critique operating systems and hardware. No one with any ounce of experience would ever ever recommend a notebock for a server. Evildave, I am sorry your credibility is now out the window.

Machine is far from a dinosaur. It is a Q6600, eVGA 680i SLi, 2Gig RAM, eVGA 8800GTS 640, and Windows XP Pro.

[imajeff]

<grin> Thanks [~147325], I wonder why you ever look at a previous post and see yourself as a raving lunatic. I don't hate Microsoft... I just hate what they do and what their OS does. Big difference, you can't argue with what they do because it will still be done. It takes much education to argue about Linux vs Microsoft. Point One: There is nothing in a name. "XP" or "Linux" does not make it good or bad, nor define what it does. I don't think you are quite cutting it with the educated part, so I will be glad to update you on current information. I too have some XP which have worked fine for years. I have learned that the best way to keep them running smooth is don't install "free" games and utilities, and don't explore all the neat-looking websites that you can find with a search or from links of gaming sites. But I know you are aware that user actions often harm the system, so lets get on to deeper issues.

Isn't it interresting how the security flaws are primarily in the Users themselves, yet the Microsoft OS users seem to get all the hackers and the GNU/Linux users (newbies or not) don't often see those problems? I get logs and stuff indicating someone tried to break in, just never broken boots, super slowdowns, things changing unexplainably, etc.

I will be glad to let you know what they did with those XP machines to break the XP machines that I have to recover. They USED them. Oh I don't mean just pick one thing like Hotmail and maybe one game. They actually looked for interresting things. My wife and children feel the need to search for new "time wasters", or entertainment. That slows down the system quite fast, and brings up interresting error messages every time we boot. At my parent's house, I only see that my Dad bowsed a lot of greeting cards when choosing one to send for a birthday. When he rebooted, Windows would not boot until I erased much of it and reinstalled. The thing that had been done before the greeting cards was to install latest security updates from Microsoft Update, then reboot. That had seemed to work fine. My computer at work was not major problems, but I finally realized that it was taking about 30 to 100 times longer to do simple things like bring up a menu in any window. I uninstalled Symantec AV and it sped up a bit. I reinstalled XP and finally decided to add more than 256K of RAM. So what's going on there... XP used to work fine on 256 but now the same XP needs more? I expected XP to need more than 98SE, but whew! There's been persistent "mysteries" where MS Win gradually requires more resources until a user is either forced to buy hardware upgrades or I've also seen them buy an OS upgrade and say "wow that's much faster than my old one", when actually it would have run even faster if they wiped the OS and reinstalled without paying for an upgrade.

I think it important to inform you that you don't have to make a "User error" anymore these days to break your system. Just go to the wrong website at the wrong time and you will automatically have some malware installed. They don't want you to know yet because they need time to work on your system. The ultimate problem is that XP comes from a history of system code that was NOT made for multi-users. It is all too common to see Microsoft Systems set up as one-user-does-all. Even if not, many exploits easily escelate the code to Admin priviledges in order to do the damage. The problem related to that is that once these exploits are revealed to Microsoft, they just don't seem to care about patching them fast enough. Once the XP system is exploited, often some sort of rootkit is promptly installed. That means that you can now download the security updates, but they will not get rid of the hijacking that you've already suffered.

Well have fun with your attempted "linux bashing". It's fun to read, anyway. --jeffs

[Evildave]

What? You don't think a notebook computer could handle your wife's photoshop tinkering? Perhaps you believe she needs a data canter the size of Google's to manage saving or loading a photograph?
Notebook-based servers work just fine. There's no magical "This is not a desktop:" switch inside that will prevent it running any server application at all.
They usually have computational power and memory far in excess of NAS or normal router appliances. They have a built in mouse, display, keyboard to administrate it. The battery acts as a UPS that can typically run it for hours on end (though external drives will need UPS protection, too if they're not low power enough to run off USB power).
It can be folded shut and left on a shelf to do its job. They're usually nice compact.
A notebook can have any number of external USB drives and devices plugged into it. It's even built to take minor abuse, both physical and thermal.
It makes a good print server, or FAX server. It can handle being an email and FTP server and even handles small-scale web serving tasks nicely. Add a second network adapter, or even use the built in wireless adapter to use the notebook as a router. Yes, you CAN use a normal wireless adapter as a wireless router. Even do the sort of router that redirects all web pages to a login screen before users can gain access to the internet.
Notebooks have the same parts inside as a server blade, give or take the dinky drive, which doesn't get used much after it's booted, and spins down when not in use.
A desktop PC consumes five to ten times the power of a notebook. It's bulky. It needs an external display and keyboard. Even a BIG UPS for a PC will only run it for half an hour. The drives in a desktop are no more suited to continuous use than a notebook's. A desktop machine is typically a LOT noisier as well. Since your bandwidth is limited by your network, even a notebook drive can read and write faster than a 100Mb network, and most people don't have 1000Mb networks in their homes.
Even a brand new EEEPC would work great as a server. Costs less than $300, has a solid state disk inside, plug however many external USB drives (solid state, too - flash drives are getting big and cheap) into it as you have, costs practically nothing to run. You could even plug in two or three external USB2 hard drives for a hot-plug software RAID configuration. Linux handles that nicely.
Or, well, you could just take that perfectly good, old notebook and prop the door open with it, or have it recycled, or line a landfill with it. Up to you.

[cryptodan]

Imajeff,

I dont operating systems due to them being popular or "better" then the other. I bash people who bash them do their ineffective education of users that use those systems that break. In my 16 years of using computer I have never ever been infected with anything that would damage my computer. The only time i have ever inflicted self harm to myself is when i was testing a virus out to see what users would see if they got infected, and to see how difficult it would to be take care of it and mitigate the threat. I have also never had any slow downs with any windows operating system due to "actual" use as you like to call it. You want to know why that is? It is because I have become quite the savvy computer user and know what not to do on a computer, and educate people around me to follow the same simple yet not so common sense ways to keep you and your computer happy. I have also taught my mom and family what software is good and what isnt, and why keeping up with patches and virus scanning updates is important.

The reason Linux isnt targeted yet is because there is no market share on the desktop compared to Microsoft samething goes for Apple. WHy go after 10% of the share when you can cover 75% of the market share and get more bots in your botnet?

[mphenterprises]

Hi All. As a general note, please keep your posts to the discussion at hand, the article detailing why some analysts believe Windows is in trouble. Spirited dialogs are fine but please refrain from attacking another member in any way.

[MarioJP]

thats just it "believes that windows is in trouble"

[MasterGuru]

Hah!

200 Watts? What do you have a 1988 IBM clone? No wonder you can't run Windows right.

Those numbers are exaggerated for most PC's people use today. Most PC's also go into power down mode and many sleep, so I find your calc's hilarious. Maybe 50 dollars a year is a better amount. And, cycling electronics on and off several times a day is not good for them. Anyone with any hardware knowledge knows that.

[Evildave]

Go get yourself something like a 'Kill-A-Watt' or a UPS that reports the power your computer ACTUALLY consumes and get back to me on that.

A decent monitor, a typical box and a couple of drives, the odd peripheral, it all adds up. Your computer eats more than you know. 175 watts for an average consumer box with only one hard drive in it. Add a spiffy video card, a second hard disk, a bigger, brighter monitor, speakers, a few USB odds & ends, and your little PC will be eating you out of house and home if you wastefully leave it powered up.

Your PC's hard drives (unless you spent double on server class drives for a desktop machine) aren't meant to be left spinning day and night, either. But hey, it's not MY data that'll get lost when they crash.

And I'm not saying you shut the PC off every time you turn your back or take a leak. Just when you're done with it. It isn't doing anybody a bit of good at 2:00am... unless it's connected to the internet and running Windows. Then it's probably a spam server for some guy in Russia.

[dragon69]

the new 9800 gx2 uses almost 200 watts at full speed with high detail (and the 3870 x2 is almost as bad ... i am guessing 155 watts )


so i believe your figure of 250 ( average user was 200 i think )


linux since it uses less resources is most likely a lot less then windows


gl and tc


chuck

[MarioJP]

crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9925296-1.html

Very interesting. Not as bad as people might think. Although i do agree one thing and we all can agree is that once your done using your pc turn it off especially when you are going to bed. I know friends that will leave their pc's on even when they are not using it. And also thanks to power supplies having the "95% efficiency" however that works plays a big role. Going to look into how power supplies efficiency actually works.





Efficiency




The efficiency of a power supply unit is the percentage of total
output DC power in relation to total input AC power. The portion lost
during conversion is mostly in the form of heat.

This index directly relates to your power bills. For example, if your
computer system consumes 300W of power, using a PSU with 85% efficiency
will require about 353W input power, and a 70% PSU will pull 428W power
from the wall. It is not hard to know how much more money you are going
to pay using a low efficiency power supply, and this number will
typically grow as time goes by.

A power supply with a higher efficiency rating will not only help save
costs - the heat dissipated will be much lower as well, resulting in
better reliability and durability, and can also help reduce noise as
its cooling fan can operate at lower speeds and still provide adequate
cooling.

My power supply hardly ever gets hot i in fact it does not get warm even under full load. The power supply fans spins at low speeds and its a 95% efficient power supply (which most seems to say nowadays but the question is are they really??)

Your fridge and AC takes lot more power than a high end gaming rig, especially your air conditioner.

[Aman]

Quote

If I read what EvilDave is saying, I think he is saying:

I don't use Windows, but will fix it all myself.

How can someone who has not actually spent any real time with a product know it?

Well...


I don't use Windows, but I am fixing its problems for all of my friends


I used Windows in past. I became profissional in solving its problem. I've been working with it for more than 10 years. In fact, the first job I had and all of the jobs I worked in was because of my experience with this stupid operating system.


DO I USE IT? NOOOOOOOOO sure I don't. I use Linux and I knew Linux because of Windows' millions of problems.
The more you became professional with it the more you hate it.


I just want to say YES people can know a product very will and still don't use it. Why? IT SUCKS.
No stability, No security, It's slow. It's a high risk for your personal data.


Windows users are naked people walking on different public areas called websites on a world called World Wild Web and Internet explorer is a highlighter that highlights some those naked users and make them more noticeable


for me: open source = open mind
Why to pay for a product while you can get a better one for free?

by the way. I would be happy to tell you why windows is broken.

1- Windows has serius problem with viruses. I Don't have an antivirus program!! Why? My OS says I don't need it. My OS says "I don't have virus problems"

2- Windows canNOT hold that long without restarting it or even recovering it. Otherwise, reinstalling it.

3- Let me quote this "Viruses, trojans, adwares, spywares... Windows lets all these enter your
computer pretty easily. The average period of time before a Windows PC (connected
to the Internet and with a default "Service Pack 2" installation) gets
infected is 40 minutes (and it sometimes takes as little time as 30 seconds)."

So what do you have to do to protect it? Windows has along list while some others say: nothing I am well protected.

4- Windows gets slower with time till it dies. The one I use is the same as the way it was 2 years ago. Although I've updated it's version four times.

5- Windows takes months or years for a bug to be solved. Rabbish!

6- Windows can't stand installing anything without restarting itself.I don't Restart my PC unless I install a seruis update.

7- Windows require huge resources = Need new powerfull PC each 3 years.

isn't that enough to say it is broken?
-----

Writing from Ubuntu Linux which is installed on a laptop with a preinstalled windows vista

[dragon69]

Amen to Aman