Re: One of the things I missed!

[frankc <frankc@NOSPAMsrv.net>]

Speaking of trust.  I understand how you do not trust your PC.  I work at a
DOE site and naturally everything is Winblows (although this sentiment is
changing as other companies progress).  I just got a new laptop and it came
with Winblows 2K.  Now I started to play with it and I have begun to not
trust it terribly.  First of all it has tons of so called "features" turned
on.  Most of these are trash and get turned off.  An example of a couple of
these "features" are the transitions for menus.  You can choose to make
then "fade in" or "slide in".  They would be cool, but they slow down menu
navigation.  I am trying to do work here!  The so called OS also had an
annoying "feature" that would only show the most common or most used
programs in the menus.  If you wanted to see the rest you had to click an
arrow at the bottom of the menu.  That was turned off as well.  Then, and
if you work for DOE you know how serious this could be, there is a
"feature" that if you enter a URL or a filename on the explorer command
line that the computer cannot find then it will automatically go to
Microsoft's website and do a search for this keyword.  Then it
automatically goes to that website.  Now many of you think this would not
be so bad.  However, at a DOE site if you view inapropriate material on the
web then you will be fired no questions asked.  So, let say I put in the
text "whitehouse" and I forget to put ".gov" on the end, the omniscient
Microsoft may end up sending you to "whitehouse.com".  This happens to be a
porn site!  And if you happened to be logged while this happened the
company would quietly fire you for missuse of government material and time
card fraud.  What a feature!

Okay, enough griping about companies that are going down the tubes.  I have
to say I do not trust the Microsoft machines that I use.  No matter what
version I use (NT, 95, 2000) they all end up dissapointing and down right
screwing up to the point that I reinstall rather than try to fix anything.
Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I have used Linux for over a
year exclusively.  I trust it, and feel like I have complete control over
it no matter which distribution I have used.  Also, if I do not understand
something I know that there are a zillion websites  that I can turn to for
answers.  No other OS nor company supporting that OS can say that without
lying.  One last thing about drive noise.  I have noticed that Maxtors are
more noisy than other drives I have used when they are doing something.
They are not annoyingly whiny.  Both my 420MB and 4GB drives make this
noise.  I wonder if they designed the noise in on newer drives for the
classic effect for customers.