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Go To Hell M$
Freejack
Jake the Not-so-Wise
in Zocalo v2.0
I just lost my entire mornings work in Excel...thank is all...
Jake
Jake
Comments
M$ apps remain buggy, even as OSes have become generally stable.
I guess I'm just lucky, I'd say at most, my apps crash maybe once a month, and usually because I did something whakky.
Games...games crash more often...
It just erks me that MS can't write a software that can at least attempt to handle errors without a sudden and complete stop.
Jake
However, while I'm no big fan of Microsoft, you have to give them credit. They make a product that, while not without its flaws, usually runs fairly smoothly on most systems. It would be like someone building an engine that had to be used with little to no modification in 90% of the cars on the market. No mean feat.
But, I know where you're coming from.
Speaking as a software developer, I can tell you that it's impossible to handle all errors without a sudden and complete stop. There's always some kind of error that you just plain can't handle. In an application as massive and complex as Excel, they occur more often. Often these errors come from an area outside your control. The kernel did something bad due to a bug of its own, causing half your memory space to be overwritten? Nothing you can do about it! Your instance is dead! Excel crashes more than a program written from scratch last year might because it has a lot of old code in it due to its long history, but the fact that it doesn't crash [i]more[/i] often is a testament to the work the developers and testers at MS put into it to make it work as well as possible on as wide a range of systems as possible.
If you hate it that much, I suggest you try out one of the competing programs, like OpenOffice.org (I hate that name) Calc. See what you think of Excel after that.
But I agree, there is no real alternative to Office right now. OpenOffice is a bad joke. I'd rather work in Notepad then.
Word doesn't like large files at all. It's almost comical how slow it gets when you have an 80MB word document with lots of images in it. :D
WinXP has been a hell of alot more stable than OSX for me...
Actually, WinXP has been the most stable OS I've used, including Linux. (Of course, I am relativly new to linux, so theres the whole "Doesnt know what he's doing and what NOT to do yet" thing going on...
However when Linux crashes, I've not lost any data. At all. Even when I half formatted the partition Linux was on, I lost. NOTHING.
Still, Win98 1st edition shall forever be the least stable OS I've ever used.
We have also had word corrupt saved files to the point we had to copy the data out of them a few pages at a time to plain text, then copy them into a new blank word document, and then completely reformat the document. This has happened multiple times.
As for large image documents, those we split in two files. Otherwise word just dies.
Oh, and A2597: You clearly didn't use Windows ME. I thought Windows 95 and 98FE were bad...until I found ME.
OS X 10.nill was terrible. 10.1 was still pretty bad. 10.2 was fairly good, 10.3 was near perfect. 10.4 is optimal in almost all ways. 10.5 looks to be nearly on par with 10.4 in raw functionality but possibly a step forward in bloat. Still excellent progress.
Windows 1: unstable & useless
Windows 2: unstable & useless
Windows 3: mostly stable & useful, but limited
Windows 3.11: not much change over Windows 3
Windows 4 / 95: unstable, hard to make the transition to, but added everything that was missing in 3.
Windows 4 / 98: semi-stable, fixed most of the awkward issues but still had interface bugs
Windows 4 / 98SE: stable, not so awkward
Windows NT4: stable, but limited due to lack of application support outside business apps
Windows 4 / ME: Massive step backwards in stability and usability
Windows NT5 / 2000: stable and massive improvement; unlike NT4, most apps supported NT5
Windows XP Home: step down from Windows 2000 due to it's limited issues
Windows XP Pro: about the same as Windows 2000; what it added was offset by what it took away, such as activation-free setup
Windows Vista: I haven't touched...and don't plan to
The sad truth is that OS X's version numbering was always two steps behind.
OS X Public Beta = Public Pre-Alpha
OS X 10.0 = Public Alpha
OS X 10.1 = Public Beta
OS X 10.2 = OS X 10.0
And so on.
Still, I thought it was (and, hopefully, still is) bitchin' that my computer actually runs significantly faster after an OS upgrade.
How is it possible to expect an OS or program to be 100% stable? No OS nor program is, though certain OS'es are better at hiding the fact that crashes actually occur. I do not see that as a good thing.