operating systems

linux

The End of the "Microsoft Tax"

Today, bowing to customer demand [http://www.ideastorm.com/], Dell launched a new series of desktops [http://www.dell.com/ubuntu] featuring the free, open-source Ubuntu [http://www.ubuntu.com/] operating system. To my knowledge, this is the first time Dell has ever offered any non-Microsoft operating system on their

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

windows vista

Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

Now that Windows Vista has been available for almost a month, the comparative performance benchmarks are in. * Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown (Tom's Hardware) * Windows Vista Performance Guide (Anandtech) It's about what I expected; rough parity with the performance of Windows XP. Vista'

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

mac

Because They All Suck

The release of Windows Vista has caused an unfortunate resurgence in that eternal flame of computer religious wars, Mac vs. PC. Everywhere I go, somebody's explaining in impassioned tones why their pet platform is better than yours. It's all so tedious. Personally, I had my fill

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

user experience

The Power of Defaults

In Typing Trumps Pointing, I extolled the virtues of the full-text search included in Vista's new Start Menu. As many commenters pointed out, the feature itself is nothing new: I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

operating systems

Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?

Windows Vista has a radically different approach to memory management. Check out the "Physical Memory, Free" column in my Task Manager: At the time this screenshot was taken, this machine had a few instances of IE7 running, plus one remote desktop. I'm hardly doing anything at

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

operating systems

Windows XP, Our New Favorite Legacy Operating System

John Gruber gloats that Windows XP does not fare well in a comparison against OS X: But everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto -- a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn't. Even the Boot

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

security

Windows Vista: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs

Paul Thurrott's scathing article Where Vista Fails [http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5308_05.asp] highlights my biggest concern with Windows Vista: > Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don't get full access

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

software development

New Year's Resolutions -- for Microsoft

For better or worse, I've been a Microsoft fan since Windows 3.1. Microsoft is far from perfect, but the alternatives were always so much worse. Can you imagine a dystopian future where we're all running IBM's OS/2 2004 and Lotus Notes Express?

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

software development concepts

The TweakUI Tips

I've been running some version of Microsoft's cool TweakUI powertoy [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx ] since the heady days of Windows 95. I recently found out that the author is none other than Raymond Chen [http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

operating systems

The Many Faces of (Windows) Death

As I recall, the Blue Screen of Death was introduced with Windows NT 3.1 circa 1993: A blue screen of death occurs when the kernel, or a driver running in kernel mode, encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by a [hardware] driver that

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

user experience

Comparing GUIs: OS X vs. Windows XP

This OS X versus Windows XP [http://www.xvsxp.com/] site contains an exhaustive, extensively illustrated 100-topic comparison of these two operating systems. The author tries to be objective, which is admirable, but the extremely detailed comparison is worth reading mostly because it highlights a lot of subtle design differences.

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

operating systems

The Start Menu must be stopped

As I struggle to open applications on my PC, I was reminded of a few entries in Scott Hanselman’s blog: Personally I have enough crap in my start menu to fill my 1400x1060 screen... arguably only 30% of the icons represent applications, the rest are just flotsam. (May 11,

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments