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cite="mid:9dda85c60812290535p6b4d5d20rdb0443a47ef5ae55@mail.gmail.com"
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<pre wrap="">Exactly. Just for one demographic: Am I going to encourage any pastor of
any church to think that I need to do major rebuilds of his PC every 2-3
years? No. Same for any executive. Or any secretary. Or anyone who does
much work with their desktop which has been customized by them extensively
over time.
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<pre wrap=""><!---->And how does Windows help such a person? I don't know any Windows user
who has lasted more than a year without having to rebuild their
system--typically a re-format and reinstall from the factory disks.
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My wife and I used the same XP Home install for five years, reloading
only with new hardware. As a professional technician, I talk to people
every day who have been using the same XP Pro install for at least
three years, and I can name several off the cuff for whom it's five.<br>
<br>
When hardware is decently supported with drivers over time, when decent
antimalware efforts are kept, this is very possible, especially with
one good registry cleaning per year or so. But I also talk to people
with machines where driver support is three years or worse, who trust
very popular and very junky antimalware tools which eat processor power
and brings reliability of everything down, especially registry
integrity. When any of these factors are involved, XP goes downhill
fast. My wife's new PC was looking a whole lot like that for a little
while (I put our old XP Home SPzero on new hardware from madtux.org),
until I found some BIOS updates. Now it's very steady.<br>
<br>
Under Windows, if I am very careful about my hardware and my updates
and my other tools, indeed I can keep a Windows install running for
five years or more. There is one client of my company's which was
using Win95 when I was called out to rescue them; I rescued them, last
year, using 2000-vintage hardware running Windows 98, because their
application (RS-483 multiterminal point-of-sale networking written in
1984) was very unlikely to be able to touch raw 16550A APIs through
XP's emulation layer. This single server for four character-mode
terminals, was first set up in DOS, then upgraded to Windows 3.1, then
3.11, then 95, then 98, as other needs and hardware came around. Never
a full reload. And it's still working right now: a month ago we had to
replace the 10basedT (coax!) bridging hub it uses, and we found a new
one on CDW, to my great surprise.<br>
<br>
J.E.B.<br>
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