I miss win 2k.
There seems to be a significant difference between using an operating system for day to day office tasks and using an operating system for development work. I'm sure that XP is a wonderful platform for writing email and playing games. I've also noticed that Win XP boots much faster (and after my 5th reboot today I'm glad it does) but I'd really rather have a computer that just didn't crash so often[0].
Right now I dislike Microsoft. Not because they have a stranglehold on the market, did very bad things to developers in the 80s and 90s, and probably sacrificed really cute animals to some evil god-thing, but because my company can't get a license to let me use win2k and dev studio 6.
I'm sure that DevStudio .NET is really really great for 99% of the developers out there[1], but for my purposes it just crashes a whole lot. I don't care if hyperlinks work in my editor. I don't like cutesy rounded buttons. I don't like spending two hours downloading magic utilities in order to turn off helpful features. I just want the goddamn thing to work in a reliable and consistent manner so that I don't have to spend lots of time watching my computer reboot.
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[0] It would also be kinda nice if the recycle bin didn't (sometimes) take 5 minutes to delete one small file.
[1] Ok, I'm not sure about that.
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Update
Ok I've been called on it and this entry isn't entirely fair. it's mostly VS.Net that crashes and seems to destabilize other things. When I'm not running VS.Net XP has been stable (aside from annoyances like the recycle bin occasionally taking 5 minutes to empty 1 file). I still think that Win2k was a little bit more stable and less prone to occasional annoyances.
I'm a games developer, most of us at the office use WinXP, and indeed at my previous employers we used it too. Never had much of a problem with it. My PC at work, despite much hammering from all sorts of things, rarely crashes and will quite happily go weeks without needing to be reset. This is using all the usual sorts of dev tools you might expect; VS.NET, ProDG, Perforce, etc...
Posted by: Phil at January 11, 2004 09:19 AMXP itself has only crashed on me once. It does, however, seem to be a bit more glitchy than 2k (e.g. bizarrely long times to empty the recycle bin, random pauses while using explorer) and it takes significantly more effort to turn off the latest round of happy-friendly features that are probably very helpful if you're not terribly computer literate.
VS.Net, on the other hand, seems to crash about every other time I use it. Perhaps it's symptomatic of the XDK being installed or a poor interaction between VS.Net and some other piece of software, but my entire team has noticed the drop in stability between 6 and VS.Net. VS.Net does seem to stabilize after a few crashes and maybe there's some weird caching or initalization behavior that will go away with increased use. But given that I mostly use EMACS and gcc for development work I don't really have a strong desire to increase my use of VS.Net.
However, my real issue here is that XP and VS.Net don't do anything for me that 2k and DevStudio 6 did for me (aside from VS.Net working with the latest round of XDK and DevStudio 6 not working with it), and I can't use either one because Microsoft effectively doesn't sell licenses for them.
Posted by: Matt at January 11, 2004 08:35 PM