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Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
I have never seen buggy drivers for quality hardware, only for cheap hardware that offloads work that should be done by the hardware to software drivers. New hardware should not add to your cppu load or use system ram in significant quantities. Unfortunately most people just cannot understand this. They see the same numbers for price vs speed/capacity/etc and opt for the cheaper stuff everytime not really thinking about why it must be cheaper for a good reason.
People just need to stop buying cheap crap for the sake of saving $20-50 bucks. (which they really will not save in the long run with all the issues that cheap hardware and overloaded impractical sotware drivers leads to...)
[refer to my earlier posts on how to encourage use of OSS software, do it by promoting use of quality hardware first!]