Qt and windows vista

[McToo]

If they've done what Apple did and use a knock-off of FreeBSD for their kernel then VISTA should be safe enough. But, Microsoft has a habit of turning a silk purse into a sow's ear.

You mean like they did when they tried to reinvent VMS and called it, what was it now, oh yes, Windows NT!

[GreyGeek]

You mean like they did when they tried to reinvent VMS and called it, what was it now, oh yes, Windows NT!

Hey, I used to run NT 3.5 and 4.0 when I first started work here. They were somewhat better than Win95 in stability, especially 4.0. There used to be a website called "BugToasters" (you can see it in the "wayback archives") which tabluted crashes per unit of time for all versions of Windows using a TSR which reported crashes back to the BugToasters mother ship as they occured. It turns out that regardless of the version, with the exception of ME, most versions of Windows crashed an average of 20 times/unit. Even XP. ME was exceptionally poor.

I found that my W2K workstation had a crash counter in the register which stopped sending reports home to Redmond after the 10th crash. It also has a phantom reboot algorithm which attempts to recover from a crash without the BSOD by momentarily freezing the screen and attempting to restore stability by reloading the environment and returning to where you were when the crash occured. I call it Microsoft's "Phantom Reboot". All in all, my W2K box is pretty stable, but it runs in cycles. Sometimes I'll get a string of crashes -- two or three per day for several days in a row -- then it will be stable for months at a time. The more frequently I reboot the more stable it is. Since I dual boot to SimplyMEPIS 3.4.2rc1 I frequently reboot so W2K is as stable as Linux, now.

There used to be a website called "F**KMicrosoft.com" which documented the Phantom Reboot and the audit trail feature that Win95, Win98 and XP have. It's a 10MB file that keeps a list of all the URLs you visit while surfing and when it gets full it phones home to Redmond, dumps the contents of the file, empties the file and starts over. The site changed its name and I don't remember what the new name is, but as of a year or so ago it was still active. If it's gone you can probably read what I've mentioned in the "wayback machine" internet archives.