My office at work is getting renovated. This afternoon a crew of contractors is coming in to demo some partition walls. As a percaution against stuff getting damaged, everything has been moved out. Holding out till the bitter end is my desk. The crew will be here in approximately a half hour, so I'm moving out now.

I don't do anything except work (office apps, web surf, etc) on this machine, so it rarely crashes and its been a long time since I've manually rebooted. But I was supprised when I noticed just how long it's been since I've rebooted.

Task manager, which among other things, records the amount of CPU time expended by different applications. Idle time is recorded by the "Idle Process". In total, I have more than two thousand two hundred hours recorded since the last reboot. This works out to over ninety one days or roughly three months of uptime!

Servers I manage have uptimes surpassing this mark, but I think this is a pretty good number for a desktop. Sadly, the UPS this system is plugged into is shared by other systems, which are not effected by the move. I had thought about loading the computer and its UPS onto a cart and rolling it into my temporary space, to keep the timer running, but no such luck.

Tell that to the Linux zealots who mock Windows for its instability!

Windows XP can be stable providing it's setup correctly and is run on decient hardware.

Originally Posted by mkh

oh i really liked that...2200hrs..phew... but u really missed the plot didn't you?instead of worrying about maintaining power to keep the system running , you could have just hibernated... the entire processes status is saved

lol yea, but that's cheating!

Originally Posted by justDIY

lol yea, but that's cheating!

An old friend of mine used to be a big Linux fan, his machine lasted over 9 months without a reboot - only happened then because his Yamaha SCSI CD writer had failed, and he had to remove it to get it replaced under warranty.

Incidently, the exchange worked really well - they not only replaced it with a later faster model, they also refunded the difference in the price, as the new writer was a fair bit cheaper than the old one!.

Hybernating is not cheating! It's a proper processor shut down under controlled conditions, and any startup using that same data should count 100% as uptime. =)

I like the idea of a PSU on a cart... That would look really geeky...

I think that those mac commercials crossed the line... Sure, M$ windows has it's problems, but there is nothing "uncool" about it. It gets the job done, and it gets it done right. Sometimes it chooses to cough and have a bad hair day, but IT IS THE best OS out there.

Originally Posted by Marks256

... Sometimes it chooses to cough and have a bad hair day, but IT IS THE best OS out there.

I wouldn't say that. probably the only thing why it is so, is that it's so common. everything is made for windows, everyone wants to make it windows compatible etc.
OS X that is used in MACs is way cooler than XP on PCs. buy hey! that's just my opinion...

A computer is a computer, and an OS is an OS, none is really 'better' than another - MicroSoft just happen to have a large share of the market based purely on IBM originally approaching them (apparently by mistake) to provide a DOS for their original PC (years after other manufacturers had been selling PC's). Despite the fact that IBM's PC was a pretty low spec it eventually (mostly due to clones) came to dominate the market - even though they had chosen a pretty poor processor!.

Originally Posted by Marks256

I think that those mac commercials crossed the line... Sure, M$ windows has it's problems, but there is nothing "uncool" about it. It gets the job done, and it gets it done right. Sometimes it chooses to cough and have a bad hair day, but IT IS THE best OS out there.

I love those commercials.


My computer is a WinXP computer, and I've never had any problems, except for when Windows erased my ntloader.dll file. boy was that fun.


However, I prefer a Mac. I just don't have the money for one before college, otherwise I'd buy it and use Boot Camp to dual boot.

It depends on the application, too. Try comparing Windows Movie Maker to iMovie. I saw a TV show on it once...the Windows final product looked grainy/jumpy/terrible. The Mac one was smooth, a bit softer, and wasn't loaded with thousands of bad transitions.

I don't know if they were comparable computers, but they should've rendered back to the camera for the final product. Maybe the results would've been different.

I've used both Windows (98 thru XP) and Mac (OS 5 thru 10.4) and have to say that the Mac OS is a bit more intuitive...

That's my two cents.