I think it's *fairly* typical

I run this stuff for a living, remember. And I know a lot of people who run W2K, mainly online gamers who have high standards of stability and performance. Hell hath no fury like a gamer whose PC crashed in the middle of a league match. (I play first person shooters, like Quake and Counter-Strike, which stress the PC substantially by using lots of memory, CPU, disk and network I/O, all at once)

I don't use SpinRite, or Ghost.

Interestingly, by comparison with previous versions of Windows, I don't see the amount of cruft accumulating on the system (temp files etc) that I did with NT and the bletcherous 9x series.

As for patches, I keep up to date on all my systems with the tools provided (Windows Update for W2K, Ximian Red Carpet for Linux).

On Linux and Windows I'm highly selective about the software I install. The result is a system that hasn't been reinstalled even once since I installed the OS, about 14 months ago. (I got a new disk).

I don't particularly like the explorer shell, for a number of reasons:

1. There are no high-quality replacements
2. No multiple desktops
3. Dragging/copying behaviour is non-intuitive for the reason you mention
4. It just doesn't look as nice as my GNOME desktop with the Crux GTK+ and Sawfish themes. XP doesn't improve on this.
5. It's slow - you try opening an explorer window onto a directory with hundreds or thousands of files and you'll see what I mean.

On unfixability, I'd say Linux is easier to fix than W2K, but there's nothing more miserable than a Linux box with a broken RPM database :-). Or a horked ld.so 8-(

Don't do games but know a couple who do. Offhand can't think of any task that would exercise so many interrupts, the bus, and all the peripherals - more. Unless maybe - if you could do all that - while compiling a new kernel too?
('Course ya don't get to to do that. ;-)

NO reinstall in 14 mos. OK. I'll be a bit more respectful of the oleaginous spawn of a despicable beast which sells relatives into slavery and leaves radioactive feces ... while fostering whininess as a speech impediment. To be fair.

Then too, the obvious question on finding out that someone competent deems ~ "yes, this sucker seems actually to work" is:

So.. What Took Them So Long ???

Besides the readily apparent cupidity, deliberate ploys as emerged from the DOJ e-mails, backward compatibility (the longest-running excuse of them all?) and just plain slothfulness (?)

(Did they in fact - throw that bug switch discovered when Alex mailed out the Nifty Doorways source code ? Come clean now. I mean.. when that switch IS finally uncovered...)

:-\ufffd

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