NT on a laptop sucks rocks. I've tried it a half-dozen
times and it simply doesn't work. Two biggest problems
are (a) the lack of hot-swap support for PCMCIA cards,
which wouldn't be such a big deal if NT didn't take so
damned long to reboot, and (b) that NT takes so damned
long to reboot, or even shut down. If you have even
the littlest problem, NT can take several minutes to
shut down. On a desktop this isn't such a big deal, but
when your train is pulling into the station, you can't
sit there and wait or leave it and come back later. You
usually have to resort to power-down (suspend doesn't
work), which with write-cacheing, means file system
corruption. And the file system corruption can make NT
take longer to shut down the next time; this is the death
spiral that usually results in me giving up on NT for
my notebook for several months, until I lose my mind again.
The only two operating systems I've had any luck with on
a notebook are Windows 95 and Linux, both of which handle
PCMCIA very nicely, and both of which are quite comfortable
powering up in unfamiliar circumstances. NT, by comparison,
can get very bent out of shape if a device is missing on
boot. In this regard, Linux does even better than Win95. |
