The Misery of Windows

Almost all of us know, Windows is a pain in the arse. It gets blotted, slow and corrupted after some time. Utilities do little other than just keeping the bare minimum functioning. So what can we do? Honestly, nothing other than be extremely careful of what software we install. How practical is that? If I see a piece of software that gives my computer some extra functionality, wouldn’t I want to at least try it to see if its a piece of junk or not? Here lies the curse of Windows. Once something gets in, it hard if not impossible to get it out. Spy ware and virus thrive on Microsoft platforms as a result. I can here the Penguins cheering now. There are a million other web sites dedicated to preserving and protecting you windows install so I won’t go into that. My opinion; they are all a bag of rubbish! Nothing could beat the cold, clean, crisp feel of a “format c: /u”. Living in the confines of a protected Windows environment is like living in jail. Why should this be? Is it that Microsoft, with all its resources, can’t build a simple and reliable OS? I think not. I would have to believe it’s a game. The game of making us buy out next OS when it comes out to fix the old one’s problems.

I got a PC way back when 16 colours was “the bomb” and sound was not even herd of (get it)! My 5 MB HARD DISK (you read correctly) was enough to hold my office suite (text editor and spread sheet), OS (DOS) and games (think Nokia 5120)! Installing something was as simple as

“c:>md xxx

c:>copy a:\*.* c:\xxx\”

Uninstalling was as simple!

“C:\>del xxx\*.*

C:\>rd xxx”

Tada! No registry entries, orphan files or bad shortcuts. Just pure nirvana. Windows eventually came out but was buggy and I couldn’t get a copy to try for an extened period of time. Years past and eventually I got a new computer which came with DOS 5. Wow. It had a cool GUI file manage program. It reminded me of “X-tree Gold” but without the extra functions and better interface. I could select multiple files individually and copy/move/delete. The new computer had to 4 MB of ram too. HAHA…I could run disk cache, virtual drive and Windows now. Not only that, with my enormous 40 MB hard disk and “386” processor, I could utilise virtual memory! By this time Windows was up to version 3.11 but had to be started manually (c:\windows\win.com /386). That was cool by me since 50% of the software wouldn’t work in windows. Windows had a clean GUI, shortcuts and program groups. Here was the big kicker; programs that crashed could be isolated. The infamous Ctrl+Alt+Del didn’t reboot the machine but instead brought up a task manager where I could close off the badly behaving application. Sweet! Back then it never occurred to me that I never crashed a single program in DOS but yet I was amazed that I could trap any delinquent process with those magic keys. It also passed me over that my 4 Mb RAM was an over kill a DOS programs yet it was barely enough for Windows. At least everything was still somewhat “clean.” Programs were still self-contained except for two small text files, “system.ini” and “win.ini”, which were easy to understand and modify. How could I have been so blind? I should have known this was the beginning of the end.

Pretty soon Windows NT and 95 came out. NT was (and still is) extremely expensive so when I bought a new computer I took Windows 95. It was a strange new world. I hated the start button, the menu system seemed strange and what was this device manage thing? My answers came with my first internet experience. The first thing I searched for was Windows 95. The next thing I did was try to get the machine to run faster. All my ole DOS tweaks had a minimal impact. Thats when the whole drives thing became important. Drivers impacted performance! The latest drivers were downloaded and installed whenever possible. I did a lot of downloading for that matter. I would download everything from Tucows and try them out. After 2 months the machine began to move sluggish, freeze up and thrash the hard disk for the simplest tasks. The cause? I didn’t know. I figured it had to be a hardware issue, so I backed up my data (onto floppy disks using PKzip), ran a hard disk diagnostic which also low level formatted the hard disk, checked the ram with a ram checking utility, entered the BIOS, removed my tweaks and set the most conservative setting. Everything seemed to be functioning as it should. Finally I re-installed the OS, updated the drivers, installed all the software I had before and copied back my documents. For some strange reason the machine was back up to speed. A few months down the road, the same thing happened. This time I took the machine back to the store I purchased it from. They checked it and said everything was okay but it still seemed relatively slow to me. I reformatted and re-installed. Surprise, surprise, it’s fast again. I was now convinced Windows 95 was a bag of arse. All things now point to something called the “registry”. This was taken from Microsoft site:

The Microsoft Computer Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines the registry as:

A central hierarchical database used in Microsoft Windows 9x, Windows CE, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 used to store information necessary to configure the system for one or more users, applications and hardware devices.

The Registry contains information that Windows continually references during operation, such as profiles for each user, the applications installed on the computer and the types of documents that each can create, property sheet settings for folders and application icons, what hardware exists on the system, and the ports that are being used.

The Registry replaces most of the text-based .ini files used in Windows 3.x and MS-DOS configuration files, such as the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Although the Registry is common to several Windows operating systems, there are some differences among them.

Registry data is stored in binary files.

Apparently, the registry would get oversized and cluttered over time with useless entries. Registry repair and optimization software did little to help me out, so I borrowed an external CD-RW drive and made an image of the boot partition after a fresh install of the OS to speed up my restores. The restores became a 2 month cycle.

A little way down the road Windows 98 came out. Mr Bill gate was a little embarrassed when it crashed during the demo but I was willing to give anything a try to over come this restore hassle. “Borrowed” a copy and updated to Windows 98. This slowed things down. Way down. But the machine no longer suffered for freezes. Thinking it was the upgrade that was causing the slow downs, I wiped my boot partition and re-installed 98 from scratch. It worked. 98 wasn’t as fast as 95 but was a significant improvement over 95 in terms of multitasking and game play (not to mention it had the newest drivers for most of my hardware). Things worked okay for a few months but then the nasty slow downs and freezing came back. No utility could fix my Windows to keep its working smooth and peppy. Good thing I didn’t buy 98. So Back to Windows 95. 98 SE came onto the scene but suffered from the same problem but had features I wanted such as internet sharing. Made the swap and was rocking with 98SE. A few web sites suggested that my VIA mother board chipset might have been the source of the problem but then why would it work for a few moths if that was the case? Never the less I continued with my daily reboots, weekly defrags, monthly cleanups and 3 month restore

Eventually the computer hardware began to fail. By this time I was fair familiar with the internal working of a computer, so I ordered the parts for a dual processor system to build myself. This would rock but 98 only used 1 processor. My choicesfor an OS were limited to BeOS, Linux or NT4. I went with Linux because I really couldn’t afford NT and BeOS was still and infant OS. Got a copy from a system administrator in UWI and went ahead. That didn’t last to long. Linux was fast, stable and had a tone of programs but required constant research on the web to get anything done. On a side note, unless you have fast internet connection, don’t use Linux. Everything about Linux revolves around the internet (trouble shooting, installing software, even getting the Os). After saving up some cash NT4 Workstation was purchased and installed. Where did my p’n’p go. To hell, that’s where. Luckily I had experience in manually assigning interrupts, memory address and DMAs for hardware else I would have been dead. I could see a noobie screwing up an NT install and not even knowing it. Hurray! This OS worked! Smooth and fast, just the way I like it but NT still suffered for the slowing down after some time problem. Lucky, the with the task manager I was able to narrow down on which application, if any, was causing a problem. There were a few surprises here and there but nothing that would account for what I experiencing. Having a faster machine with multiple processors and much more RAM helped lengthen the time between a complete OS re-installs.

A new hope; Windows 2000 made its début in 1999 (a little early, don’t you think). I grabbed the first pirate copy I could get my hands on to give it a test run. Yahoo! Plug and Pray is back with a bang with functional ACPI. It rocked. Driver support was a little rocky as with all new OSes but it worked. I used that OS for over a year before the slowdowns started happening. The thing is Service packs began coming out for 2000 which corrected these little issues. I believe I only re-installed the Windows 2000 OS once because Service Pack 3 was crap and it screwed my computer over. It’s not that the slow-down problem didn’t happen. It’s that it was bearable. At that pint I realise I had not bought the OS. How long before Uncle Bill comes knocking on my door asking for his $1500tt. All this time Windows XP, the final DOS killer, splashed onto the scene. So again I borrowed the OS and gave it a swing. It was slow but the interface looked like something straight out of a WB Loony Toon cartoon (a plus in my opinion). XP came with additional functions such as a firewall, system restore points or desktop sharing. This alone made it worth the investment for me. I was kind of hoping they would have fixed the time related sluggishness. Well after about 3 yrs, 2 service packs and 140 MB of patches and updates, guess what prompted me to write this post!