Ten minutes with Windows
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
For the last couple of years I’ve worked almost exclusively with the Debian GNU/Linux Operating System. The last version of the dreaded Windows Operating System I really used was Windows 98. I’d heard some good things about Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and have even installed Windows 2000 for a while on my desktop machine at home, even though I hardly ever used it.
So when I got my new workstation at work, I decided to put Windows 2000 on it, just like my previous workstation (which I also almost never used.. I preferred my Debian laptop), with the full intention of really using it to do some useful things.
After working on the machine for ten minutes after the installation was complete, I was already fed up with it. This is one bad OS. Incredible. Even the most basic things capabilities every OS should have, for instance multi-user, are buggy and unworkable.
I wanted to install an application on the machine, but I wasn’t Administrator. Apparently, one can only install applications as Administrator. So I held the Shift key down and right-clicked on Run as... in order to install the application as Administrator. The application installed itself. So far so good. But I didn’t like the application, so I decided to uninstall it. I went to the Configuration panel and Shift + Right-clicked the Add / Remove Programs icon and ran it as Administrator. But it wouldn’t let me uninstall applications?! The button was there, sure, but it didn’t do anything?!. First off all, if I can’t uninstall applications (even though I supposedly was Administrator) it shouldn’t show me a button to uninstall applications. Second, it should show an error message when ever it doesn’t do what I think it’s gonna do. So much for multi-user, a feature that has been in real Operating Systems (Unix) since day one.
Next I tried to.. oh, wait! Windows crashed again. That’s the second time in the first day I’m running Windows. Score so far: Debian GNU/Linux: 6 times in 9 years; Windows 2000: 2 times in 1 day. Nice.
Okay, so I wanted to open an FTP site in this Explodrer thingy. So I entered the URL: ftp://todsah@electricmonk.nl and waited… and waited… and waited.. and finally fell asleep. I killed Explorer and tried again. This time, after about 3 minutes of waiting, it showed me a dialog in which I could enter my password. Having done so, I waited another couple of minutes which I spent by connecting to the same FTP server with FTP on my Debian Laptop, downloading some files and closing the connection again. Finally Windows decided to log me in and I could get to work. But wait.. The fine programmers at Microsoft completely forgot to add an option to browse the parent directory of the FTP site. Pressing the little tiny Up Arrow button simply landed me on my default internet explorer page (MSN commercial crap). I searched and searched, but all to no avail. I couldn’t leave my home directory on the FTP server. Great FTP client implementation guys! Not!
I gave it one more try by adding the FTP site as a Network Place, but Windows decided to crash the entire OS instead of connecting to the FTP server. The entire OS CRASHED when I tried to connect to an FTP server.
Windows is, what, ten to fifteen years old by now? One would expect a little stability by this time. One would at least expect the features present in the OS to work half of the time. Alas, tis of no use!
I’m sure some people will mail me or tell me that everything’s become much better as of Windows XP. Yeah, right.. That’s what they said about 98, ME and 2000 too.
You know those warnings they put on packs of cigarette’s in the Netherlands?