operating systems

linux

The End of the “Microsoft Tax”

Today, bowing to customer demand, Dell launched a new series of desktops featuring the free, open-source Ubuntu operating system. To my knowledge, this is the first time Dell has ever offered any non-Microsoft operating system on their desktops. Until today, it was quite literally impossible to decline the Windows license

By Jeff Atwood ·
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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’s a bit

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Because They All Suck

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 of Mac

By Jeff Atwood ·
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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 don’

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?

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 all, yet I

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Windows XP, Our New Favorite Legacy Operating System

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 Camp logo:

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Windows Vista: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs

security

Windows Vista: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs

Paul Thurrott’s scathing article Where Vista Fails 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 to certain features unless they provide an in-place logon before performing any

By Jeff Atwood ·
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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? Brr. I get

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development concepts

The TweakUI Tips

I’ve been running some version of Microsoft’s cool TweakUI powertoy since the heady days of Windows 95. I recently found out that the author is none other than Raymond Chen: Some people claim that Tweak UI was written because Microsoft got tired of responding to customer complaints. I

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Many Faces of (Windows) Death

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 ·
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user experience

Comparing GUIs: OS X vs. Windows XP

This OS X versus Windows XP 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. For example, this little

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Start Menu must be stopped

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 ·
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