Ooh! Ooh! I managed to crash OSX! I kept my computer running for a week straight, no sleep, and had iTunes shuffle to a new song once every 10 seconds, and for each song scrobble to Last.fm and also download album art and lyrics. At some point it borked out.
I know Windows gets a bad rep for crashing—I use XP on my Macbook and I've had no crashes yet—but beyond crashing, I'm astonished at how grotesquely unstable it is. I use an app on it that takes up the full screen, where one window generates the full screen window, so Alt-F4 doesn't work, and I can't open a task manager because it just gets auto-hidden by the screen. That's incredibly bad practice, but I've seen it done by multiple Windows designers because it, unlike OS X, doesn't offer a rigid set of guidelines for its functions.
Beyond crashing and messing up, Windows is just incredibly un-smooth. Perhaps they fixed it with 7, I don't know yet, but when I use XP or Vista I'm struck by how hard it is for me to treat its window metaphor with any respect. I can't rely on windows to move when I click and drag them, they don't have any particularly good window hierarchy in place, and everything is so choppy and clunky, even with a good mouse, that I find myself resenting the system. That compared to OS X, which is the smoothest system I've ever used. Everything in it adds up brilliantly.
I still like XP—or, I do until there are more Mac emulators available—but I completely get axod's argument, and agree with it. Microsoft killed computers' reputation, and are primarily responsible for why people I know think computers are so impossible to deal with.
I go months without rebooting win2k, but I've also seen it blue screen simply by removing a USB/serial adapter with the port still in use, which is obviously a third party driver problem.
You might try setting the "Always on top" option for taskman, so that other app windows can't cover it up. I've _never_ had a problem with taskman being obscured by another window.
That's how it's set up. It still gets covered because the full-screen is being constantly redrawn. So I can click on it, because it's above the black screen, but I can't see where to click, because the black is always above it, frame by frame.
I know Windows gets a bad rep for crashing—I use XP on my Macbook and I've had no crashes yet—but beyond crashing, I'm astonished at how grotesquely unstable it is. I use an app on it that takes up the full screen, where one window generates the full screen window, so Alt-F4 doesn't work, and I can't open a task manager because it just gets auto-hidden by the screen. That's incredibly bad practice, but I've seen it done by multiple Windows designers because it, unlike OS X, doesn't offer a rigid set of guidelines for its functions.
Beyond crashing and messing up, Windows is just incredibly un-smooth. Perhaps they fixed it with 7, I don't know yet, but when I use XP or Vista I'm struck by how hard it is for me to treat its window metaphor with any respect. I can't rely on windows to move when I click and drag them, they don't have any particularly good window hierarchy in place, and everything is so choppy and clunky, even with a good mouse, that I find myself resenting the system. That compared to OS X, which is the smoothest system I've ever used. Everything in it adds up brilliantly.
I still like XP—or, I do until there are more Mac emulators available—but I completely get axod's argument, and agree with it. Microsoft killed computers' reputation, and are primarily responsible for why people I know think computers are so impossible to deal with.
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