Re: Why do I bother?
On Saturday 25 February 2006 15:17, Chris Metzler wrote:
...
> For years, the solution to serious misbehavior in Windows has been
> to reboot or reinstall. In Linux, the solution has been to attack
> the problem directly and solve it; rebooting or reinstalling won't
> make the problem go away. That's not a defect; to me, problems
> that are solved by rebooting *scare* me.
There are some cases where rebooting a system is the best way to solve
the problem under those circumstances. For instance, I have a Java
program my clients run on Windows. It takes incoming data and prepares
up to several thousand pages of output at a time, which is stored on
disk, then printed through OpenOffice. I had a client with a failing
hard drive and even wrote an extra routine, so I could verify the
validity of each file after I wrote it and again, before it was
printed. Even with that, some of the files could not be loaded by
OpenOffice properly. After running the program and printing out all
the good files, OpenOffice would often hang and not respond to my
program, or to anything he did, short of using the Task Manager.
My solution? Reboot when done. Why? Have you tried to teach someone
without much time how to use the Task Manager without messing up their
system, then teach it again the next week when he needs to nuke
soffice.exe again, then teach it to him the week later? Many times it
is far faster to tell an end user to reboot than to walk them through
things like using the Task Manager.
On Linux, it's much easier to write a few routines to access anything
like this and make a script or small program to do it for him. On
Windows, it's a pain.
Hal
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