Windows explorer is the worst application ever! ...by MS

[rjohnstone]

I'm strongly considering getting a mac for my next PC. Its supposedly built on the UNIX kernel and should be much more stable than windows.

OS X uses the MACH kernel from BSD.
It's stable, but so is the Windows core in XP and even more so in Vista.
It's better protected from user screw ups than previous versions.

I still crash my Mac more than any of my Windows boxes combined.
Stability is directly related to how you use (or abuse) your OS.

ANY OS can be brought to it's knees pretty easily. You just have to find the right idiot/genius and give him the keyboard.

Stability issue very rarely occur at the kernel level... they mainly occur at the user layer (applications) and hardware layer (drivers).

[Infernal Death]

Total Commander is a very nice application. I use it at work all the time and also at home. Check it out:

http://www.ghisler.com/index.htm

Flo

[Ralph E.]

You're kidding...

problems with a MS product, who woulda guessed that... :ROTF:

[thetroy]

eh I had a G4 iBook and it crashed way more than WinXP maybe I am just a n00b

[Firebird V]

Go with a Mac. Dont get an ibook/ imac.

[Tashtego]

I regularly have a problem with explorer when browsing a shared folder accessed by cifs from a linux virtual machine running on the same computer. Haven't figured it out yet but it isn't just explorer in my case, cygwin chokes as well when I try to get around explorer. These long delay type problems almost always lead back to some kind of DNS issue, waiting for lookup timeouts etc.

[Newc]

While I haven't had nearly as many problems with XP SP2 as I've had with older versions (NT4 SP3 was the best), I have had a few issues with how it handles/defines a "crisis". If one of my el-cheapo USB drive enclosures decides to blink out, XP restarts the entire system, even if the drive was not actively in use (scanning, etc).

I'd much rather it tell me that there's a problem with the device than shut down the whole system just because a hardware driver blinked out.

I'd also love to see some version of Windows actually be able to give detailed information about errors rather than "a device driver on your system is having a problem and Windows closed it". Great. Which one?

Of course it will give you all the technical data for the error report, though hex offsets mean little to me

What's wrong with "there was an error in c:\windows\system32\fishball32.dll, which controls your USB drives. There is another file on your system that can handle these same procedure calls just fine, so while we look for an updated version of fishball.dll, the system will change over to using the other .dll for these functions without interrupting your system"

And they really need to do something about Live One Care. About a month before it expires it hijacks your system and crashes it when it tries to throw up a renewal notice.
I put a disc in my DVD drive and as soon as the tray closed my computer shut down, then when it comes up I tried it again and the same thing happened. At the third reboot, I finally got a BSOD saying it was caused by my antivirus (LOC) and when it crashed a 4th time I saw the blue "RENEW NOW" screen with Live One Care at the top a split-second before the screen went black.

Since I was in a hurry I renewed rather than uninstalled (God knows what trouble that'll cause), but it will be removed next time it expires. I will not have a program that holds my system hostage like that. I'm sure it's embedded like cancer, so that once I uninstall it I'll have to completely rebuild my system, just like with Norton.

[Tashtego]

I use some of the tools from the link below to hunt and kill stuff like that, though I haven't for live-care. ProcessExplorer and regmon I've found the most helpful for finding what dll's and registry keys are being used.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/processesandthreadsutilities.mspx

[Spivonious]

Newc, if you go into System Properties->Advanced->Startup and Recovery Settings you can uncheck the "Automatically Restart" checkbox. Now if the system crashes it won't reboot.