Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Open source developers provide 'glimmer of hope'

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I think that Coplein assumptions about software quality are right on target.

What springs immediately to mind are the two software platforms that I use: Windows and Linux. Odd that the windows desktop starts to crawl after a mere few days of running 7x24 while the Linux desktop chugs away without a degradation in speed for months at a time.

Now before you raise the issues about any sort of windows spyware / malware infections, the machine is clean. It's been checked by MS AntiSpyware, Adaware, Spybot as well as f-secure. So that's not it.

Before you go and raise the issue of performance optimizations such as defragging the hard drive, registry, or paging file, these are all already done. The registry files are each in a single fragment, and the same is for the pagefile.

So what is deal? I figure that there must be a resource leak in the OS, or some of the DLLs that the application are using that is causing the slow down. This is in fact supported by the task manager. After a few days, the virtual memory consumption is over 1 GB, while when freshly booted, the OS only uses around 400 MB.

Other indications of software quality? Well the if the windows box does a lot of heavy network traffic for a long time, slowly but surely, the network connection degrades until if becomes unusable. At this point you have to reboot the machine. Similar situation in Linux? Nope. Linux runs under heavy network load for months at a time without a hitch or slow down.

Conclusion: Microsoft has some software quality problems. Like you didn't know that?

Right, and instead of fixing the problems, they come out with more overly complex code to do even more fancy needless stuff, like all the glitz and clamor of the new Longhorn interface. Just another source of continued resource drain.

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