Among the things you are not going to read in this space is today’s entry, complete with a snappy image of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in Mystique blue. This is because Windows ME takes everything with it when it crashes Explorer. That would be everything. Even when all you’re trying to do is save the damn file after the sudden first-strike launch of the Blue Screen of Death.
In case you were wondering, it is not in fact possible to continue normally. Ever. But it’s always nice to have false hopes.
Who let that Gates guy in here, anyway?
You know, there’s always…Macintosh. Mac OS X. Nice, stable Unix. Apache.
Just saying, I haven’t had a crash in months, and that one time it was a hard disk failure.
Mac:
Good points: stable
Bad points: all your friends own PC’s, so you can’t share software, hardware, or storage media.
For some people it’s worth it. For me… my super-geek brother is a PC guy, and if I had a Mac I wouldn’t get all his hand-me-down parts when he upgrades.
Even the temp files? I can’t recreate a BSOD using my IE (and I’m on XP, not ME), but I’m almost convinced that I’ve excavated web graphics and css files and stuff post-BSOD from IE’s temp files before. Not that it does any good if you were inputting data into a form, but anyway.
I’ve loathed Macs ever since I blew about $5K on a tricked-out Powerbook for my ex-fiancee. Or maybe it’s the ex-fiancee I loathe. I get them mixed up.
Ah, y’all just wanted to see the picture of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, that’s all. Can’t say I blame you.
Macintosh? I never saw the appeal. There are a couple of immediate strikes against.
I like games way too much to step away from the PC mainstream (it’s the greatest platform ever built), and no, all titles do not come out for Mac. More to the point, they’re much harder to pick up on eBay. And I usually buy second-hand.
The system stability is not so much a selling point for the Mac as it is a forehead-smack for the PC. How did we ever let Gates muck it all up so badly? IOW, it’s not that the Mac does things well, it’s that Windows does things badly. ME is a particularly dreadful system; its new trick is crashing the spool file on startup. Why? Who knows? Pierre uses OS/2 on his box. No kidding.
I first used the Mac in the dark period when you had to insert every floppy that had ever been inserted before you could close an application, and the bad taste remained, I suppose. (Remember the Programmer’s Switch? That was cute.) As far as the vaunted design, well, feng shui looks great in other people’s houses. I’m a bit too messy to care.
Layne, it’s good to see you here. I’m a regular over at yours, and it’s my theory that the fiancée was to blame, the machine innocent. Bitter pill nevertheless.
I use XP at the Day Job, and I’ve never had a BSOD with it. Which is not to say that I’ve never crashed XP; I have a gift with operating systems. It takes some doing, and it’s an utter system-lock when you do. It hasn’t happened lately.
In Windows up through 95 I used to be able to scan the swap file with a text editor and extract the last stage of my work (it happened often, and I got handy at it). Post-95 the systems resists, all of the data is scattered in a zillion little folders that don’t like to be searched, and if there’s an easy trick I don’t know it - though I’d be happy to learn. I managed to extract the graphics (useless, the photo is already on my drive) and the links, which the system saw because I copied them to the blog entry. The entry itself, however, in WordPress, does indeed use a form to talk to the server, and I don’t think the far end keeps a copy when the connection is broken.
But thanks for asking…