[computer-go] My experience with Linux

[Nick Wedd]

Ok, I'm going to speak up in defence of Microsoft.  (I'm not really that 
fond of them, and I am thinking of moving to Linux, particularly if 
Vista is as bad as I have heard.)

I became anti-Mac when trying to buy one for my then employer.  It 
seemed like a reasonable deal, until the salesman asked me "what 
industry are you from?".  This totally put me off.  I was trying to buy 
a tool to do a job.  When I go to the hardware store to buy a 
screwdriver, they never ask me what industry I am from.

I learned to appreciate MS when we kept having problems with machines 
crashing on the office LAN (all Windows machines).  We had deduced that 
this somehow involved HP printers, which we had a few of on the LAN.  I 
was following a Compuserve discussion group about HP products, where 
other users were describing the same problem.  HP representatives were 
saying it was nothing to do with their product.  Then an MS 
representative posted there, claiming that when we installed an HP 
printer driver, if we selected the default installation, it also 
overwrote part of the OS (a file called printman.exe, which I think did 
the scheduling) with a buggy one created by HP.  My experiments on the 
LAN confirmed this, we had a ceremonial bonfire of HP install disks, and 
that was the end of the crashes.

But there was no apology from HP, no admission that their buggy 
scheduler was the cause of the problems.  It was people in MS who had 
traced the problem and published the answer.

Nick
-- 
Nick Wedd    nick at maproom.co.uk