Saint Aardvark's Journal: Windows 2000

A real OS shows messages when it's booting to let you know how far along it's gone. If something goes wrong, you can see where. A real OS doesn't have a fucking marquee of slowly-changing colour that you have to stare at intently from six inches away to see if it's frozen in place and yet another cold reboot needs to happen. Oh, and it logs how the boot went. Every time. Without being asked.

Also, if an OS comes with a package manager -- and a real OS does -- it shows you the fucking version of the software that's installed. A real OS knows that knowing FooTastic installed is only half the battle -- knowing that it's the buggy 6.2 build is just as important.

I try to give Windows and Microsoft a chance, I really do. But this is fucking ridiculous.

In defense of MS

[ender81b]

In defense of Microsoft, you can log stuff on boot if you want to, heck you can even set it as the default. And everything is logged once that nice pretty GUI comes up in the event logs.

As for software version... most software you just go Help --> About. To be honest I prefer MS' installation procedure on software to anything besides apt and portage. I mean, when a windows program is installing you usually have a fairly good idea where it's going to put everything (i.e. whatever directory you specify +

Two words

[Lumpish Scholar]

A real OS ... logs how the boot went. Every time. Without being asked.

Two words: Event Viewer. (Start / Programs / Administrative Tasks / Event Viewer) I'm sure it doesn't have everything you want, but looking there couldn't hurt.

I'm not going to try to make you hate Windows less. I hope this helps making it less painful. (You can hate it anyway.)

Re:Two words

[Saint Aardvark]

I went there, and this particular time it didn't help. I had added hardware to a machine, and it wasn't taking; lots of freezing when adding it, even in safe mode, and lots of freezing when booting during the second screen (there's the black screen, then the white screen w/the marquee, then the blue screen). Event Viewer didn't give me any clue about what was going on.

In the end I changed a BIOS setting -- PNP OS; from YES to NO -- and it worked. I've come across this before w/this particular card, so