Reformatting every month is beyond overkill, XP installations can stay in good shape for years if they are properly maintained and 6 - 12 is more then enougth if your paranoid about it.

XP BSODs arn't something you see very often, i've never had one at home and any I get at work are usually down to HD failure or the byzantine third party networking client we use.

 

Better solution than constant reformatting: Use Firefox (or at least upgrade to IE7). Run Spy-Bot: Search and Destroy weekly. Stay away from warez websites. Don't install weird stuff. Defrag your hard drive monthly. You will stay running fast pretty much forever.

 

wish that were so, but even when doing all that, the computer still bogs down over a short amount of time. The start up and shut down time of my computer right now, compared to after a fresh install of XP, the difference is HUGE. Programs such as firefox and msn take longer to start up after time.

Sitting down for 2 hours and formatting every month or two really makes a difference in performance  

 

This isn't the same machine that you had ME on for donkeys years is it?

That'd explain why your getting dragged down by stuff as trivial as browsers and IM clients, i'd be keeping my ear to the ground for people throwing out thier PCs for newer ones if I was stuck with no money and a box of that vintage.

 

It seems like it would pretty much have to be an old machine for it to get bogged down that fast. Since that thing's not going to run any current games anyway, I'd actually consider downgrading to Windows 98 SE, or switching to Linux with XFCE.

 

Linux surely doesn't have a driver model that I'm aware of - it's very anarchist. I'll grant that. And truth be told, that anarchy isn't all bad. The open-source movement is very reminiscent of computing's early days (MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, the Homebrew Computer Club, etc.) and produces some great stuff. As for Apple, they don't leave developers out in the cold, whether it be with drivers or anything else., for that matter.

Well, there are few guarantees, but I suspect (I wouldn't know where to get data) that the uptime on almost every major game console has been over...95%? Better than Windows, anyway.

Could be wrong, but if I understand Apple correctly, it's not a matter of options (in fact, switching OS X to Intel compatibility has likely opened options more than anything else) but choice. They choose to stay closed. Every book on Apple I've read indicates that Steve Jobs is a control freak (in a good way, mostly). You said yourself that the OS is blamed, rightly or wrongly, for hardware malfunction - letting goofball companies like Dell sell computers with OS X could damage X's reputation. And reputation means a lot in the marketplace.

If the founder/then-CEO of one of your greatest competitors wrote you a letter with advice, would you take it? The Gates/Jobs rivalry has been well-documented (heck, there was a TV movie about it). Any such letter could be construed as psychological warfare. I mean, hell - if memory serves, the rumor was that the recent Mac commercials about Vista infuriated Gates.

Forgive me - I must have misspoken. I wasn't making an argument about user-serviceability. I was making an argument about the absurd amount of maintenance that, in my experience, is required to keep a Windows box operating well.

 

Anarchy doesn't produce a desktop OS with industrywide support. And there's a difference between telling developers how to make shit work with your OS and proactively providing a consistent, unified framework for kernel interfacing, APIs, drivers, backwards compatibility, and documentation so thorough it puts the Oxford English Dictionary to shame. Apple is not and has never been a developer-centric company. While Microsoft was busy establishing itself as the primary vendor of BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal to various computer manufacturers, and preparing to release Windows 1.0, Apple had three disastrous launches of systems that locked out developers in various ways: Apple III, Lisa, then Mac (yes, the Mac's sales in its initial years were fucking abysmal). They've learned remarkably little since then; the ADC is hardly in the same league as the MSDN.

It's not a matter of choice if your only alternative to the status quo is self-evisceration. If OS X were suddenly released for non-Apple hardware, Apple's computer revenue, which as of last December was a little over 2/3 of their iPod revenue, would plummet overnight, and you're kidding yourself if you think standalone OS X sales would be of sufficient volume to compensate.

Except that it wasn't Steve Jobs heading Apple when Gates sent the letter, it was John Sculley. And since when does a TV movie belong anywhere near a discussion of history? The letter is here, second one down (the first one just lists some potential licensees). I suggest you read it all. It will give you a much better idea of the context and nature of Apple and Microsoft's working relationship at the time.

 

Aaaaand Windows Vista will be retired exactly one year later!

BTW, when is Playstation 4 coming out anyway? 

 

I have to admit that Win XP is a pretty solid OS. Both the ckdsk and defragmenter run much faster then it did on Win98.

I have been getting the BSOD at times since '07. But it's most likely hardware related then software.

But I do find it SERIOUSLY convienient that I didn't have to use the driver CDs for my digicam and printer. XP found 'em for me  

 

Better than any version of Mac OS or Linux too, for that matter. The point remains though that a platform can still become notorious for failure despite tight control from the makers.

You do realize this is the same as admitting that your GF's problems might have nothing at all to do with Vista, right?

It takes next to no effort to maintain an XP system, and not much more than any other operating system. It just takes suitable hardware, an occasional defrag, and some common sense. Unfortunately, people habitually install all kinds of bizarre crap on Windows systems, and they'll often try to run new versions of Windows on outdated hardware. Users of alternative platforms install a lot less garbage, partly because they're usually using their computer for more specialized reasons than your average Windows user, and partly because there isn't as much random software available for those platforms in the first place. That's just taking poorly made software into account. There's also a lot more crap blatantly trying to attack Windows--one of the perks of being the dominant platform. If everyone were to suddenly switch to Linux or Mac, I promise you they'd suddenly look a lot less stable... and I've seen Mac OS X crash enough as it is.

 

So, am I no longer getting support for my Windows 3.1?