Welcome maggie_lucy!

[robinturner]

I have finally managed to get a LiveJournal account sorted out for my mother, who is now maggie_lucy (turned out that I'd entered the wrong e-mail address when I originally set up the account).

In other news, my stomach and bowels seem to be recovering (only occasional cramps now) and I am starting to get the hang of Windows XP, especially now I've installed Mozilla. Things are looking up.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

It's pretty bad, but I can live with it. I'm still tempted to install Linux on her computer, though. Whenever I have to use Windows, I think "Why does anyone use this?"

[vret.livejournal.com]

What are you finding hard about it? XP is only difficult for people who know another OS (including Windows ones) well. Once you forget about thinking that everything should work the same way as whatever you are used to it becomes one of the easiest modern OSs to use.

XP Home is, of course, rather harder than Pro because so many bits of the admin interface are missing, but if you don't know that they should exist you shouldn't miss them.

[solri.livejournal.com]

A day later, I'm already pretty used to it. It has Mozilla and OpenOffice, which are what I use 90% of the time. It won't resize windows L-R unless you minimise them first, and sometimes freezes when resizing them anyway, but that's a minor irritation.

Not having everything installed as standard is odd. No Perl, no LaTeX, no ftp and of course no bash, but I can always install them (well maybe not bash) if I need them. Having to download a program just to unwrap a tarball was a bit of a shock, though I suppose if this kind of thing were part and parcel of the OS, there would be more anti-trust cases.

The thing I find really irritating is only having one desktop. I hear there is now some XP add-on that will do virtual desktops (welcome to the 1980s!) but if I install it, I might break something. Last summer I completely borked my mother's Win98 system just by downloading the security updates!

I also keep getting popup messages inviting me to download bogus security patches (i.e. trojans) and from girls telling me they're getting naked and horny.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I've never seen anything like that resizing problem.

The anti-trust cases cause serious problems. For example, XP comes with a simple but adequate inward firewall, but it is switched off. They did that because they knew they would be hit with anti-trust cases if they switched it on, even though someone who wants to install another s/w firewall might need to use the built in one to install it. Problem is, they have now been hit with a load of cases for negligence because people have heard that it has a firewall, connected to the net with it switched off thinking it was safe, and been hit by something. AIUI, MS are trying to get the courts to order them either to switch it on or off.

I had virtual desktops on Windows 3 back in 1990. I used them for a year or 2, but I gave up on them after a while and never missed them since. These days I run several complete virtual machines at once.

There's no similarity whatsoever between Win98 and WinXP. They have no code in common. Win98 never was a real operating system, just a games platform.

I also keep getting popup messages inviting me to download bogus security patches (i.e. trojans) and from girls telling me they're getting naked and horny.

Switch the firewall on!

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'd switch it on if I could find the thing. I already have Norton firewall running, which handles most things, and cheerily informs me every half hour when someone tries to run an exploit.

Interestingly, our university's computer centre advise all users who insist on using windows (i.e. almost everyone except the hard scientists using Unix and the graphics types with Macs) that they use Win98. They say they're fed up with people misconfiguring XP and bringing down the whole domain (something to do with the stack, perhaps?). I suppose it's like they say about C++: you're less likely to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

BTW, is there a way to remove Outlook Express completely, rather than just removing the menu entries?

[vret.livejournal.com]

I'd switch it on if I could find the thing.

That's a good example of how XP does things logically, but different to everything else. It's against each connection, so you need to go to the properties for the connection (Control Panel/Network Connections) to set it. There should be a tab on there for it for dial-up connections (I don't have any here at the moment, so I'm not sure exactly what it is called).

I've never heard of any problem with XP bringing down a network like that. I would guess that people were setting their machines up as DHCP servers, or something daft like that. All the network managers I have heard express a preference would prefer everyone to switch from Win9x to XP to reduce the user support they need to put in.

I've been using C# recently. It's a bit like a Culture gun would be. If you aim it at anything it suspects you don't want damaged the safety catch goes on.

I don't think you can completely remove Outlook Express, unfortunately. It annoys me because it means I can't set my test machines up with no MAPI installation, which would save me having to mess about telling OE I don't want to send information emails and bug reports every time I test one of the apps I have been working on.

[solri.livejournal.com]

It's not even a matter of selling, since Linux is free. But it takes a long time to break a habit, and there is still some work to be done on hardware compatibility.

Apparently Linux is the most common OS preinstalled on new computers in Thailand.