Windows ... the greatest BUG ever??
Well, I opened up a topic on AO and clicked on the "quote" button on the last reply and typed in my opinions (actually a question to be frank). It took me a complete 18 hours to post that reply. Guess why? Of course, the title says it all: The reason was Windows XP.... the greatest software BUG ever created by a company which is said to be the richest and the most enfluencial in the whole world, namely MICROSOFT.
I was not able to find out even a single clue as to why this happened! The only SIN I commited was to click on the "Quote" button in one of the AO's page. I trust AO more than the software says me to. After clicking the button, the OS hanged ( a regular problem most users would face on Windows). I waited for almost 10 minutes for the system to come back and do something. But then I realised that the mouse pointer (the arrow on the screen) has stopped responsding to the mouse displacements. After about two minutes, I turned off the power (as I always do on most hang conditions). I restared the machine and was surprised that upon the reboot, Windows did not allow me to do anything at all! It just shwed me the desktop. When I clicked on an Icon, that would be the last option if I clicked on the start menu, that would be the last action. In short, the first action wuld be the last action. I trie everything from the aplication reinstall in safe mode to a system restore and then ultimately tried to repair Windows installation and huh! nothing worked.
Upon calculation, I found out that I have reinstalled Windows XP more than 50 Times in last 2 years. Now thats a huge number. With hundreds of Hours wasted in instaliong drivers and other application only to see the light of the day for 1 month or so, Windows kills me!
All my software were fully updated. My antivirus (Avast 4.7) firewall (Kerio firewall) and Antispyware (Defender) were running and were up to date. I never open any suspicious sites and the system was all clean. There are just 5 programs that can access the internet (firefox, yahoo messenger, google Talk, IE (which I almost never use) and the update services of my antivirus).
I tried all that I could but failed. Ultimately, I had to boot from UBUNTU 7.04 CD, back up my docs and other data into USB ZIP drives and reinstall.
Now can anyone please tell me what could be the reason for such an abrupt corruption of the OS? What files would have been responsible and what can be done to it?
Now I have decided to buy a VMWare license and run Windows on top of Linux (well that enables me to get more OSes working too!) and then use my devices virtually. Would that be a nice Idea?
I also have seen on openSUSE site that version 5.5.3 of VMware workstation would cause some problems. So I have decided to get version 6 of VMware workstation (for Linux) which I hope due to its increased support will not throw away errors. Has someone here tested this piece of software onm openSUSE 10.2? And do I suppose to get help if something goes wrong?
No.... you took me wrong!
OK, I agree the thread name sounds as if it is a "Let's Bash MS" thread. However when I wrote down the thread, I was really really frustrated by another failure of Windows. I agree that to some extent I have been researching with my PC too much. About half of the reinstalls were due to my "PLAYING AROUND" with system files and things as such. Some other 25% (percent) were done when there was no one to tell me that what to do when the PC goes slow and I myself was a newbie ... I didn't even know that defragmenting will increase the sped upto some extent.
But since last 1 year or so, I have been something most people call a 'power user' of Windows. I too agree on the fact that there MUST be something really wrong with the installs. As far as BUYING the software is concerned, I had tried for it, but I lived in a small place in India and there are NO dealers for SOFTWARE.... leave alone the question of the Windows.
AS far as 50 times in the life of a machine is concerned, I DO NOT think that it is ridiculous considering that most of them were done by me due to "KNOWN" mistakes. Reducing the number to NORMAL failuer will bring it down to around 8 times or so. And those 8 were COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED failures. It is not the first time this has happened. There have been times when the OS crashed on me when I clicked on "Insert --> Picture" in OO, click opened the 'My Documents' etc.
@rlt : Yes I do run openSUSE as my OS for most other uses and have been understanding the OS slowly and steadily. The only problem I have on that one is the inaccessibility of the Internet due to my modem which is a GPRS enabled Mobile phone connected to the system by USB.... and almost all Linux users know that USB has got a bad life on Linux.
@Nihil : Yes, we are talking about clean installs which include the formatting of the whole hard disk.
1> I have tried more than 1 CDs. They all have same results. I used a CD without SP1, then I used one with SP1 on it and then I slipstreamed SP2 onto it. I even installed HOME edition form my friend (he had original one) and the results were same. On the other hand an installation which ran SLOW under normal conditions live on the same machine for 1 year without any problems. I am unable to undertand why this happened.
2> I am not sure what Windows Defender did. All I know is that it was running in the background. However i think that I did not open any suspicious sites which could make USE of the Defender. Again, I use firefox, not IE.
3> All reinstalls were failures in case of Kerio firewall. Each time I tried it, it said that the UNinstallation was successful but then the Kerio services were visible in the Services section! What about that?
I am not flaming Windows or MS in particular. Windows for sure is a good OS but it crashed upon me on many occasions. My question is not on Windows. My question is on "what went wrong with ME?"