Ok, I'm officially mad. Steaming. Furious. I simply can't believe how awful Windows is, and (unfortunately) how gullible I am. Those who have been here on ZDNet UK for some time might remember that I bought this Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 shortly after I started my blog here. It came loaded with Vista Business, and a "fallback" DVD for XP Professional. I tried running Vista on it. I really tried, I really wanted it to work, and I said exactly that in my blog here. But it didn't. Every time I tried it, things started out looking promising, and after a month or two it would go belly-up. Three or four times I reloaded Vista from scratch and tried again, hoping that the latest Microsoft Updates would fix it. Eventually I gave up, reloaded one last time with XP Professional, and ran that with no problem for two years.
A month or so ago, through my own carelessness, I wiped the disk on this laptop. I had to reload everything from scratch, so (like a fool) I thought well, Vista SP2 is out, everyone says that it is "all fixed up now and works great, and reliably", so I'll try that again. I loaded Vista from scratch, added all the updates to SP2 and beyond, and I've been running it that way since. Until today. Yesterday I used this laptop, and everything was fine. I shut down normally, and there was no problem and no error messages. Today I tried to boot Vista, and it said that there was something wrong, Windows wouldn't boot, and offered to boot into the Recovery procedure. A minute or two of that and it became clear that it wasn't going to "Recover" anything, the only option was to reinstall Vista from scratch.
Good work, Microsoft. You have sunk to new lows. You are even worse that I had considered you to be. You, and the so-called operating system that you sell, are the lowest form of scum on the earth. Oh yes, I know, Microsoft and all of their apologists will be happy to tell me that it was my fault, I did something wrong (I didn't), I didn't have anti-virus installed (I did), I must have gotten a virus (I didn't), or a rootkit (I didn't), or I screwed up by rebooting at the wrong time when an update was installing (I didn't, and this isn't "patch Tuesday" week anyway, is it? Or is it 'patch everyday" with Microsoft now, considering all the out-of-cycle emergency patches they have been sending out). It's simple. Windows is unreliable garbage, it always has been, it always will be, and if you use it you should be willing to accept that risk.
I am no longer willing to accept that risk, even part-time as a secondary operating system on this laptop. Windows is gone, it has puked all over its disk for the last time here, and I will not reload it. I am in the process of transferring the data to one of the Linux partitions - yes, Linux is quite happy to read the partition that Windows says is hopelessly corrupted. When that is done, I will reformat that partition and load something reliable and useful on it. Perhaps CP/M, that would be infinitely better.
A very, very angry...
jw 26/5/2010
P.S. Please, PLEASE, unless you want to hear a very long string of words that I learned during my military service, do NOT tell me that the "solution" to this problem is to give Microsoft even more money and "upgrade" to Windows 7. First, if Vista is not stable, or reliable, then Microsoft should withdraw it and either offer a free "upgrade" to Windows 7 or offer a refund of the purchase cost. Second, and the reason I quote "upgrade" in these statements, I absolutely don't believe the Windows 7 is any better, any more stable or any more reliable than Vista. They come from Microsoft, they are utter garbage, and exchanging one pile of garbage for another is neither an "upgrade" nor a solution for any problem in my opinion. So don't even suggest it. Thank you.
jw
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I too have seen Windows installations totally corrupt themselves, leaving the operating system in a state like you mention. In fact, I've seen similar things happen to Windows Server 2000/2003 where the NTFS filesystem becomes corrupt, leaving valuable user data and the system in an unbootable state. At first you'd think it is caused by hardware, however after installing a fresh copy of Windows over the top of the same exact partition, everything would run fine again for years. So that concluded that the problem was 100% faulty software. And, it has happened to me many many times on all sorts of systems, with Windows Server as well as Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
Meanwhile, Linux does not have these problems. I've run Linux systems with EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, and the XFS filesystems, and I have NEVER had any sort of file corruption like NTFS. That says a lot, as some of the systems we used held terabytes of data and had a ton of throughput (ton files were purged and moved daily). And not even one hiccup. So, what do you choose if you want to retain your data on a reliable filesystem? I don't trust Windows' NTFS for my personal systems, that's for sure. Everything I run nowadays has EXT3, EXT4, or XFS. And as an added bonus, these filesystems don't need to constantly be maintained and defragged like NTFS either.
I also agree that Microsoft should have given a considerable discount to users that were stuck with Vista. But unfortunately, they have continued to be greedy and have forced users to again re-buy their software. I bailed from the Windows train as soon as Vista was deemed a failure, as I did not want to continue heading down that path of re-buying upgrades and dealing with constant software failures. Thankfully, Linux has been a saviour, and I can now use my computer rather than maintain it.
I would also like to add that Windows 7 is the same old stuff underneath, with a shiny new frontend. I've seen the same old problems with Windows 7, that have plagued previous versions of XP and Vista. Just the other day I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on an HP EliteBook 8550w and after a couple days the laptop would no longer boot and needed to repair itself. After waiting about 10 minutes for the repair to complete, it ended up failing. After a reboot, everything magically started working again. It's these type of issues that completely steer me away from Microsoft products.
@apexwm - Thanks for the comments. I was so angry yesterday evening that I hadn't even thought about the filesystem issues. Overall I'm not surprised that Microsoft has remained stagnant with NTFS for... how long is it now? 10 years? 20 years? Of course, the reason is that developing a new, reliable, robust filesystem requires time, effort, talent and intelligence, and Microsoft is certainly desperately short on the latter two. Besides, why waste time and money trying to repair something that is contributing to your continuing cash flow? For the average user, a PC that won't boot means it is "dead", and it's time to go and buy a new PC (which of course means paying for a new Windows license). Anything that helps Microsoft reach into your pocket again is a good thing as far as they are concerned.
In fact, was't there supposed to be some fantastic new filesystem from Microsoft included in either Vista or Win7? Hmmm. I don't recall which it was, but I'm sure it was mentioned as part of the advance hype when whichever version was under development. Then it suddenly got dropped, either because Vista was so far behind schedule, or because Win7 had to be rushed out because Vista had already been revealed to be a stinking pile of excrement. Either way, as far as I can tell once it was dropped rather then being pushed back into whatever next release, it disappeared from the face of the earth. I wonder if that is because it was useless junk even by Microsoft standards, or because Microsoft realized that NTFS is serving their purposes extremely well, as mentioned above?
jw
Windows NT and the NTFS file system came out in about 1993, everything since has just been patches & cosmetic changes. Windows7 is little more than a service pack for Vista.
I'd configure the machine with one small-ish partition to hold the Linux O/S, and the other as a ext4 to hold data and mount it into the files system via fstab. This makes upgrading Linux much easier, as data and O/S are totally separate.
Ah, yes, good old CP/M. I used to love the OS.
Ah, Jamie, I have never seen you in such a state. But, I have to agree with you 100%. My Toshiba laptop came with vista, and it lasted one day, and was replaced by Linux. I now have a laptop, netbook, and one desktop running PCLinuxOS 2010.1, and I just upgraded my final desktop to Kubuntu 10.04 yesterday. We still use XP at my part time job and it is a useless fragment of excrement, as well. Windows is for playing solitaire, Linux is for actually using your computer. BTW Mad Hatter, I still have an old Commodore 128D that runs CP/M.
@Mad Hatter - So did I, and I still have a lot more RESPECT for it as an operating system then I do for any version of any "operating system" that has ever come out of Microsoft. My statement was only half-joking, if I were to load CP/M on the partition, at least I could rest assured that it would not suddenly and inexplicably destroy itself, or destroy everything on the entire disk.
@Ator - Yeah, I haven't been in a state like that in quite some time. I think it was not only that Windows had wretched all over itself, I was equally angry with myself for having been fool enough to have swallowed the propaganda from Microsoft and their minions and apologists about Vista SP2. But all's well that ends well, and that Windows partition has been overwritten with Linux Mint 9, the data partition has been changed from NTFS to ext4, and the laptop is running beautifully, of course.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw