Personal Windows XP & Linux experiences

[Paul]

Often PC's get a bad rap because IT departments don't like to spend time troubleshooting - it's easier to grab the latest Ghost image and put the computer back to stock - they don't care about the impact to the end user. Hell, even my own employees exhibit these traits despite my b*tching about it. My wife used to be a sysadmin for EDS on a huge state contract - they wouldn't spend more than 10 minutes troubleshooting before they'd reimage. (*so my wife will never click a link that doesn't make sense... I'm lucky there. Next training topic - don't put the house phone number on every form that asks for a number - to stop the 99% solicitor to 1% real call ratio). That approach irritates the crap out of me though. With very few basic troubleshooting steps, I can fix 97% of all viruses and slow-startup issues in under an hour. 2% require special boot disks to get rid of certain viruses that strap themselves in too early in the boot process. less than 1 percent requires re-imaging. HiJackThis and a basic understanding are all the tools I need.

This is dead on. I've worked with a lot of people in corporate and consumer IT, and most of them couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Personally I agree that 1% of problems REQUIRE a re-image, but I will generally look into a problem, note the cause, and if it is virus related I'll re-image the machine on GP.

I recently started fooling around with Ubuntu on my work laptop, and after a week I'm able to do about 75% of the things I do during a normal workday without kicking over to XP. As my understanding of how things work increases, things are getting better. I've been really happy with the speed of everything, but I get crashes at least twice a day. A lot of them are related to me adding/removing hardware, but I'm really disappointed that I can't hot swap a hard disk without having to reboot. I haven't yet decided if I'll stay with it full time, but if I can get everything working correctly I'm leaning towards yes.

I would never reccomend anything other than XP to anyone who asks though. It is definitely the universal OS.

 

[thewireguy]

keep going great info.......

 

[sic0048]

The other data points I have are how we use all Win xp here at work and we keep 4 IT guys busy running around installing patches, reinstalling OS's, and watching blue screens all day. Nothing but Microsoft XP / Office on Dells here. My personal PC, which has nothing but stock install and Pro/Engineer on it got flaky about 6 months ago and needed a reinstall. Just like the rest of them here.

If you have a PC with Windows XP, only stock apps, and the apps are well written - there's nothing that should go 'flaky' in 6 months unless you have a hardware issue - in which case a fresh OS install would not help you. If your PCs are 'going flaky', requiring a clean OS install every 6 months, someone is installing garbage on them, or you are running poorly written apps.

Those IT guys are running around because their users are clicking on every link they receive via email, opening malicious attachments, and visiting questionable web sites. I know, because I deal with it all the time.

Not trying to start an OS war here either, it's easy to do. But just want to emphasize that Windows is not always the best fit for this application.

I agree, but the reasons and examples you are stating are either incorrect or overblown.

I agree that there isn't anything about Windows XP (or Vista) that is going to make it degrade to the point of needing to reinstall the OS.

Our laptop runs Vista and we've had it about 2 years. It's our primary internet machine and also general machine we use applications on. At one point recently it was becoming very sluggish and having problems loading internet pages (especially those with flash). That might lead one to suspect the machine, but I ran all the virus detection and spam detection software and couldn't come up with a good cause. One might be tempted to give up and simply nuke and pave that machine. But I started searching elsewhere. The ultimate problem was with my Netgear router and Netgear wireless AP. I replaced the router with one flashed with Tomato and the wireless AP with one flashed with DD-WRT. All my sluggish problems on the laptop dissapeared after that. So it wasn't the machine at all, but devices that most people just take for granted and assume are running fine. I think situations like this may happen all the time and the real problem is never really found. Instead people waste their time simply guessing at what it wrong and being disappointed that the problem always seems to come back. Just my 2 cents.

PS = it was changing the router that made the biggest difference. I ran that for about 2 weeks before I decided that since I was using identical Netgear devices for both the router and wireless AP, that I better replace the AP too. I had a La Fon router laying around (bought for $5 on a slickdeal.net post), so I flashed that to DD-WRT and put it into service. That actually also seemed to speed things up, but changing the router seemed to make the biggest difference.