I don't usually, but
Kier For moderate record counts and concurrent users, Access is very stable. I've used it heavily for nearly 10 years, and...
I'm afraid I couldn't resist it...
Usually you don't find me saying how WinXP sucks, because on the whole, it's been okay for me. However, for my brother it sucks like the proverbial Electrolux.
snips Yes and no... Running any system on quality hardware is going to work better than doing the same on crap hardware. That said, I have a...
He's had a laptop since just before Christmas, and obviously, it had XP on it, 'cause that's what they come with. He bought it with a view to installing Linux when he was ready to. Today he comes down to lunch with me and our remaining Aged P and a couple of friends, bringing said laptop with him. Pretty much the first thing he did when he arrived was ask for a Live CD, because his XP installation had totally shat its drawers the night before, while he was in the process of doing some administration of his new email server. It was so bad that Knoppix 3.9 couldn't even access the worst affected parbreastion when we booted it up - something which has never happened in my experience of Knoppix. It was utterly f***ed, and he decided to write off Windows altogether and install FC4, which was his intention anyway. So that's what we did.
He'd been using Cygwin to run X on this laptop, and doing no more than setting up some stuff on his server, yet it went breasts-up. He's smart enough not to leave it wide open to malware and such - after all, he runs Linux - so what happened? Who knows? Whatever it was, he could barely even get it to boot properly in XP afterwards.
snips Having done it more than once, yes. Depends. You want, say, Gnome or KDE, memory is going to be an issue - or performance...
Needless to say, it won't have to worry about booting Windows now - it'll be FC4 from now on.
snips Debian. Because I have one, because it works, because there's no good reason not to? The machine has more than sufficient capability to do what I expect it to do, so there's...
Then you obviously haven't "used it very hard". And before you regurgitate the word 'moderate', I mean anything more than: 10...
Wintrolls like to pretend that XP doesn't do this sort of thing. But it does. Maybe not to everyone, but to some.
As a small postcript, our friends have between them a Mac (OSX) and a laptop running XP. The laptop hardly gets used, because my friend hates XP, finds it almost unusable and always giving trouble. She prefers hubby's Mac for its simplicaty and lack of worries about security. Brother and I mentioned Linux as a good alternative to XP, and she was definitely interested in giving that route some thought, if the laptop proves to be suitable.
To round it off, she and husband both have to use Access a fair bit in their work (lab tech and teacher) and both utterly despise it as an unstable piece of crap that gives them more trouble than it's worth.
What does this prove? IMO, that not everyone loves XP, or thinks MS apps are wonderful. Some people have very negative experiences of them. Neither of my friends are techy types, just users.
-- Kier
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