How Soon Will I Be Switching To Windows 2000?
The Twelfth Day of never; when hell freezes over; etc., etc.
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Sm@rt Reseller
zdnet.com
So when will I be switching to Windows 2000? Uh, well, probably never.
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But even if my work-a-day machines had the horses, W2K already has shown itself to fail more than I want it to. In all fairness, it is better than Windows 95 and 98, but I've been averaging a failure a week on my two W2K systems that I've been running since release 3.0. That's one a week too often. In fact, one day, a workstation system just up and died like a dog with the gold release without any rhyme or reason. That failure still has me stumped. The system had nothing running on it and then one day it simply refused to run any executables except the operating system. The only cure for that one was to reinstall.
Now some people tell me that's that not so bad. They're also the same ones that tell me they reboot their NT machines once a week and that it's not the OS's fault when a system crashes; it's the applications'. Guys, get with the program! An operating system should never have to be rebooted every week to keep it running smoothly. My BSD, Linux and NetWare servers haven't had to be rebooted since 1998. Folks, really and truly, there is no way a misbehaving application should bring down a server class operating system. If your OS does either of these and you give a rat's rear about reliability, you need to switch to a better operating system--and that's not W2K.
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It doesn't help that all 63,000 known problems, and the tens of thousands yet to reveal themselves, are hidden away. One thing that open source really does well is let everyone know what's wrong and what's being done to correct that. For example, if you want to know even the minutest details of what's wrong and what's being fixed in the next version of Linux, you go to Alan Cox's checklist for Linux 2.4. Want to know how close Mozilla, the open-source version of the Netscape browser, is to reality and what still needs to be done? You head over to Bugzilla.
Want to know what's going on with Windows 2000 problems? You find out there's a heck of a lot of them by reading Sm@rt Reseller, but that's it. Much as we like you reading our magazine, we're not your one-stop W2K debugging service.
We think the best ways to solve problems is to be open about them. We also think that won't happen at Redmond this millennium. So it is, that while I may install Whistler (the next edition of W2K, coming in 2001), I'll be sticking with the tried and the true in the meantime. I mean, heck, at least, I've gotten NT 4 SP6a to run smoothly for months on end so long as I only use my properly tuned NT applications. Do I really want to start messing with that again? And with an operating system that has so many potential pitfalls as W2K? I don't think so!
IT professionals will be a MUCH tougher sell than Microsoftifarians that have never experienced a serious operating system.
Thanks to Thomas A. Watson on the Linux thread. |
