KMFMS

Pierce · Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 2

I used Windows for about 9 years, and despite being moderately satisfied with it, I finally gave up after being unable to use my Windows XP license any further. I had purchased Windows XP in 2001, in the days when it came out, and after a couple of hardware changes during the years, my XP license became unusable. I was simply unwilling to buy another XP license just for the sake of Microsoft's gain, and for the technical problems I encountered with XP.

In 2004, I had to call Microsoft Support to get a license key for my XP, and, the most outrageous scam ensued that I ever encountered. First of all, their computerized system didn't recognize my computer ID, so I had to contact the operator. The phone line had a bit of line noise, and the operators kept complaining about the line noise and they can't understand what I'm saying and that I should call again later. However, I am in Germany, and there's no such thing as line noise!!! The whole telephony network is digital, there can't be any noise, especially where their call center is located. So I felt I was being made a fool of. Yet, after a couple of calls the operator gave me an activation code.

I had a defective mainboard, and suspected a defective hard drive, and I changed it around, re-activating Windows every time and going thru the phone registration procedure a few times. Windows XP wouldn't boot up properly.

After a couple of attempts, I was fed up and installed SuSE Linux instead. It worked despite the broken mainboard and (alledgedly defective harddrive), doing the best it could., and I didn't even lose any data when switching mainboards.

I cannot recommend Windows XP to anyone anymore because I know now that NTFS 5 is deeply flawed. It cannot be that the machine doesn't boot up, or the filesystem self-destructs, when there's a problem with reading a few sectors from the harddrive. Neither ext3 nor ReiserFS have that problem!!

Plus, the whole phone activation thing is truly petty for a company like Microsoft. I didn't know they were criminals. (Had I recorded the phone conversations, I could've gone to court with them, I guess. What they're doing is called "unfair competition" here in Germany and a offense punishable by law.)

In the meantime, I've gone from SuSE Linux to Slackware and I'm very happy now! Smile

BTW, I would also recommend Solaris 10, however it doesn't have scanner support, so it wasn't suitable for me, I guess.

Oh, and, Kein Mitleid fuer Microsoft!!! I hope they will die a horrible economical death!

Tux · Joined: 29 Aug 2006 Posts: 7

I hear ya. Microshaft has nailed me too. I got pissed at Bill Gates world of blue screens and crashes (seriously, I have had numerous crashes when playing games like the original The Sims). I tried Ubuntu Linux on one of my other PCs and noticed a substancial increase in performance. It had a 233 MHZ Cyrix M2 333 CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and a 3 GB hard drive and it still ran Ubuntu 5.10 comfortably. Could I run XP on it? No. XP takes 9 GB OF YOUR HARD DRIVE SPACE. I tried Winblows Defender and the Idiot Exploiter 7.0. What were they like? Shitty. IE 7.0 RC1 constantly crashes and it renders pages with low quality. Defender doesn't even detect simple spyware. I have had experiences with Macroviruses and WMP killing my sound card.
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I am no longer a slave to Microshaft

yahurd · Guest

man, do i hear ya, my experiance? NO problems, read about linux, try it out like it, dual-booting, and call MSN for support getting connected on linux, similar experiance, only at the end of it, msn refuses to connect to any other browser! Evil or Very Mad

Brad R · Joined: 07 Oct 2005 Posts: 27

I don't use MSN, but try using Opera or Konqueror web browsers on Linux. Both can be set up to identify themselves as "Internet Explorer". I knew someone with a Hotmail account that couldn't access it with Mozilla, but could access it with Konqueror.

Guest · Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:46 am Post subject:

went aol years ago Very Happy

James Bond 007 · Joined: 01 Apr 2008 Posts: 5 Location: Hong Kong

9876098 · Joined: 07 Sep 2010 Posts: 2

I might as well post in this topic about my bad experiences with Microsoft.

- I was installing Windows 95 on an older computer, and everything went smoothly. After logging in for the first time, a pop up window appeared saying that some things needed to be installed. I noticed that it wanted to install Internet Explorer 4.0. I decided that I might as well comply and I could uninstall it later (there was no cancel button and the X in the top right of the window was grayed-out).

The install froze after reaching 78%. I waited 15 minutes, but it was still right as it was 15 minutes before that. I went to task manager and forced it to close. Then, after restarting the computer, I received an error about explorer.exe being missing and was unable to do anything after that. I reinstalled the OS and reproduced the results, doing everything exactly as I had done before. After installing it for the third time, I forced the task to end when the pop up appeared. Everything worked as it should.

- In Windows 2000 SP4, I was unable to view GIF, JPG, and even some Bitmap images in paint because it "was not supported." To make matters worse, when I tried to view a PNG image with paint, I received an error that iexplore.exe could not be found. I removed paint and installed a freeware program called "Ultimate Paint." All image formats were easily viewable.

- I had an AVI file I was trying to watch with Windows Media Player (whichever version is provided by default in Win2k), but received an error having something to do with codex. I used a search engine to search the error on the World Wide Web to find out ways to fix it. One of the first results of the search was the Microsoft support site. Do you know what it said? "You may receive this error if you do not have Internet Explorer 5.0 installed." How outrageous! I removed Windows Media Player and installed VLC media player.

- Recently, while using Windows 2000 SP4, I decided to install Netscape 8.12. After running the setup file, I received the following error: "Netscape will not run on this version of Windows. Netscape will run on the following operating systems:
Windows 98, 98SE,
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP, XP SP2

Please click OK to exit the installation."

This happened 5 minutes ago so I haven't found a solution yet, but I've posted my query in a web forum.

Well, those are the only significant problems I can think of; hopefully this will liven the forum a bit. =D

9876098 · Joined: 07 Sep 2010 Posts: 2

I have a few more things to add; I guess you can never run out of things to complain about. =P

I'm glad that Microsoft respects my privacy and doesn't try to force me to use their products.

http://tinypic.com/r/2h2fw9x/7

Apparently removing Internet Explorer from "Remove Windows Components" (um, since when is a browser a component of the OS?) doesn't completely remove it. I've been having this pop up every 10 minutes for the last week.

http://tinypic.com/r/307uis1/7