On Saturday 25 February 2006 15:17, Chris Metzler wrote: ... > For years, the solution to serious misbehavior in Windows has been > to reboot or reinstall. In Linux, the solution has been to attack > the problem directly and solve it; rebooting or reinstalling won't > make the problem go away. That's not a defect; to me, problems > that are solved by rebooting *scare* me.
There are some cases where rebooting a system is the best way to solve the problem under those circumstances. For instance, I have a Java program my clients run on Windows. It takes incoming data and prepares up to several thousand pages of output at a time, which is stored on disk, then printed through OpenOffice. I had a client with a failing hard drive and even wrote an extra routine, so I could verify the validity of each file after I wrote it and again, before it was printed. Even with that, some of the files could not be loaded by OpenOffice properly. After running the program and printing out all the good files, OpenOffice would often hang and not respond to my program, or to anything he did, short of using the Task Manager. My solution? Reboot when done. Why? Have you tried to teach someone without much time how to use the Task Manager without messing up their system, then teach it again the next week when he needs to nuke soffice.exe again, then teach it to him the week later? Many times it is far faster to tell an end user to reboot than to walk them through things like using the Task Manager. On Linux, it's much easier to write a few routines to access anything like this and make a script or small program to do it for him. On Windows, it's a pain. Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
