Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 08:59:20 -0600 (MDT) From: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> To: "Tim Oneil" <toneil@visigenic.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <199704191459.IAA28746@rocky.mt.sri.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970418161816.009e3e40@visigenic.com> References: <3.0.32.19970418161816.009e3e40@visigenic.com>
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> >Umm, have you *ever* used Win95 or NT? We *regularly* (easily every 3 > >months) have to re-install every few months (sometimes less than 3). At > >my wife's work, they re-install everything on a regular basis as well, > >and almost every company I know that uses any M$ OS recommends > >re-installing the OS at *least* once/year due to application upgrades. > > Ummm, yes. I can't say we never re-install, but certainly not with that > frequency. Why in the world do you feel it necessary to re-install > every 3 months? Because user-land software gets updated, or we find critical bugs in the system (ie; security patches). 'Updating' from IE3.0 to IE4.0 leaves all sorts of crap lying around in the system, and if you want to try out NetScape and IE on the same box, there's no way to get rid of all of the 'crap' left lying around easily. Let's say you have Office95, and you want Office 97. You'll end up with alot more disk to re-install Office97 *from scratch* than to upgrade your existing system, and you don't have the possibility of wiping out newer DLL that fix security problems. Basically, if you use M$ software, everything is in bed with the OS, so 'removing programs' doesn't remove everything. On my laptop I recently re-installed everything from scratch after wiping out the disk. Before I started, I had 40MB free. After I re-installed from scratch I had 170MB free, with the exact same software on it after I re-installed. After double-spacing it that was 300MB of free space, which on a 810MB laptop disk (which also has FreeBSD on it), is a *BIG* deal. > I'm sorry, but that's absurd. Microsoft doesn't even release > patches for their crap every 3 months. They most certainly do. They are called 'upgrades', and just because one particular piece of software isn't upgraded every 3 months, if you combine the OS, Office, Explorer, and development upgrades you can *easily* install software more often than every 3 months. > speak) to NT 4.0 when it came out. I would really like to know > what symptoms I should look for coming from my workstation that > let me know when its time for a re-install. Do you mind? Lack of disk space, and no clue where it's at. Software refusing to work because of out-dated DLL's after you've 'upgraded' a piece of software. Software that refuses to work because it required an old DLL, and a new piece of software installed a newer version. Weird un-explained crashes. Possible security problems with the OS/applications. I could keep going if you'd like. At my wife's work, they have to re-install because the OS locks up enough that they must hard-reboot the system. After awhile they corrupt the hard-disk, and that requires a re-install (especially so under Win95 which does caching by default.) Nate
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