IMHO, Windows 2000 is the ONLY OS m$ ever made that could qualify as 'Very Good'. Win9x/me was unstable and still based off 95 (which was based off DOS). NT was hard to use and didn't have good plug&play.
But then something happened.
Its a proven fact that M$ works best when under stiff competition. They realized they had no competiton. (RIP everyone else)
So the 'will this work well for all users' got replaced with 'will this make people buy more units'. Thus comes XP. Trying to appease to the n00bs with the five hundred thousand goddamn wizards, eye candy and little rabid dogs that help you with everything, and also trying to lure in the experienced PPL with useful stuff like fast user switching. It didnt work. If it simply had an 'advanced mode' which would turn off each and every wizard and replace it with a normal Setup screen like everyone else uses, it might work.
I've recently had the unpleasent experience of setting up two OEM machines (gateway desktop XP Home, and Dell laptop XP Pro) with XP on them. What I think it needs is a '**** Off' button. (yes that is the best way I can describe it, sorry kiddies). When pushed, this button would make the current wizard or MS passport popup go away and never come back, and then show a normal setup screen or uninstall itself if possible.
I dont like having to hack the OS to make it work. I dont like having to look for a 'uninstall Messenger hack' just to get rid of that thing telling me to get a fscking Passport every 5 minutes. I know what windows update is, dont tell me about it every 5 minutes.
And oh yeah, Office XP is just as bad. The XP Pro laptop needed to get MS Outlook 2000 email transferred off another box. God forbid that I get the normal 'user profile setup' thing in ONE screen, so I can set up the plugins for this guy's Internet Email, Address Book, and then show it where his PST file is. Nooooo. I have to go through a wizard for Email, a wizard to set up the profile, and then a completely different area to set up the PST file...
OK I'll stop ranting now. But I think MS has reached the point where they're starting to go backwards. I'm an experienced user and I've used MS products for many years, and with their latest batch I really don't want to upgrade (downgrade?) and much prefer my current system (2000).
if M$ keeps this shit up... I think they'll be dead in a few years. Even market momentum can't cover for a bad product.
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