Windows, Reviewed

Mr. T’s post jibed with something that was in the back of my head. I can’t sleep right now, and have sent my friends enough meandering e-mails, so I’ll post here.

For at least the past month, I’ve been in Linux exclusively. I have a 160 GB, 5400 RPM drive with Linux, and a 60 GB, 7200 RPM drive with Windows. (I also have a combination of network storage and external drives for moving/storing data.)

My roommates have been big into Orange Box lately, so I figured I’d give it a try. (It can apparently be made to run under Wine, actually, but I didn’t want to bother.) I swapped out disks, booting into Windows. And it was just one thing wrong after another after that. Admittedly, many of the problems weren’t directly the fault of Windows, but it was truly the worst experience I’ve had in a long time. (Steam was even more badly-behaved than Windows.)

Here are some things that really bug me:

  • Performance. Windows has my ‘fast’ hard drive. I scan regularly for viruses and spyware. (But I’m so OCD that I’ve literally never had any viruses, or even any malware, on this machine.) I disable unnecessary crap from starting up. I run a lean, mean machine. And with a dual-core processor and 2 gigs of RAM, it should fly. Especially on the 7200 RPM drive. And yet I can be in Firefox browsing the web under Linux in less than it takes Windows to finish logging me in. I don’t really understand what’s going on, really.
  • Fragmentation. Maybe this partially explains the above point. Most operating systems don’t make a big deal about disk fragmentation. It’s (supposedly) just a non-issue on both Linux and MacOS filesystems. I suppose I wouldn’t know, not having a defrag tool. But my Windows drive is laughably fragmented. I have more fragmented files than non-fragmented. And, when I was using Windows regularly, I’d run a pull-out-all-the-stops defrag every week or so, scheduling a boot-time defrag to make sure it also got my paging file and the MFT. Having successfully “fixed” my heavily-fragmented paging file, I thought it a done deal. But it’s again in about 300 pieces. What the hell? I thought it was one file. Where did it go? I know it stays between sessions because I tried to get rid of it when shutting down and couldn’t. So what happened?! And really, shouldn’t that be permanently mapped out?
  • Bizarre errors. I never thought I’d see the day when I was criticizing Windows and not Linux for this. Linux still has its share of bad errors. But what’s with the “The memory cannot be ‘read'” errors? (BTW, Memtest finds nothing.) What’s with rtvscan.exe crashing?
  • Slow performance. Not just bootup, mentioned earlier. When I go to start an application, I usually sit there waiting for several seconds. Just sitting, waiting. I’ve never had this problem under Linux. Maybe it’s just that Linux isn’t a fan of big ‘suites’ of programs, preferring to have lots of little lean applications. But I click on the Firefox icon in Linux and Firefox pops up. I click on the IE icon in Windows and my disk churns and, five seconds later, it pops up. Why?!
  • Disk mounting. Again, I never thought I’d see the day when I thought Linux had this better than Windows. It used to be that you’ve have to pull up the command line and su to root and mount a device manually, specifying the device name and a mount path and the file format and various other parameters. Unplugging the device without unmounting it would usually lock up the system and/or cause a kernel panic. Now in Ubuntu I just plug in external devices and they show up on my desktop. They’re comparable that way. (Although Linux doesn’t give me five little bubble icons in a row about “Unknown device” and searching for drivers.) But what about when I want to remove something? In Linux, I right-click and select “Unmount,” and the icon disappears and I remove it. I forget periodically and nothing bad happens. I consider myself to be a very advanced ‘power user’ of Windows, and I’m still not sure. Do I click on that little icon in the system tray? Why is it so hard to use? I’ll find something that sounds like what I want, and I click on it, and it brings up this hierarchy of devices, ranging from the name of the physical disk to a ‘mass storage device,’ and asks which I want to stop. And honestly, I know a lot about Windows and I know all about the hardware, and I’m still never sure. Rusty informs me that Vista’s the same way.
  • Updating. I guess it’s not as practical since Windows has a whole different environment, but MacOS and Linux both have a centralized package manager. An automated daily check might inform me that my word processor and graphics editor have new versions, and let me choose what to do. In Windows, each application does this on its own. It’d be kind of nice if Windows had a central package manager, just so that I wouldn’t have constant headaches when running Windows for the first time in a month with everything I start going out and downloading new updates.
  • File copying sucks! I’ve long-complained about how copying a group of files shouldn’t abort completely when it hits one bad file. But I discovered something else. I was getting low on disk space, so I was moving things over to another drive. I had about 3 GB free, and was going to move a DVD ISO over to the external drive, too, for 7-8 GB free. But it wouldn’t work, due to insufficient disk space. I was confused, because there was plenty of space on the target disk (like 400 GB free). It’s apparently that the Windows drive didn’t have enough space. Which for a second almost made sense: it’s a big file, so it needs room to work. But wait… Why? It can move it, chunk-by-chunk, over to the new disk. I can’t think of any other way of doing it, in fact. And there’s enough room to copy it at least 75 times.

Half-jokingly, I pondered over e-mail, “Why do people ask if Linux is ready for the desktop? The question, I think, is ‘Is Windows ready for the desktop?’ And I’m not sure.” But really, if I have constant headaches, I can only imagine how the people with 75 IE toolbars and lots of spyware and viruses and no idea how computers work must feel. I think my computer is slow? I have bizarre, unexplained errors? I’m confused by technobabble messages that pop up?

Of course, in the interest of fairness, there are two things that I’m liking about Windows:

  • I can put my laptop into standby / suspend. It’s been possible under Linux for years, but doesn’t work properly out of the box for me, and I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to make it work.
  • There’s this one insidious bug (I’m running the “bleeding edge,” Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon, so I suppose I can’t complain too loudly) where the logout/shutdown button locks up the machine for 30 seconds before it displays. This is apparently a known problem with several different causes, but it seems pretty pathetic that it’s still an issue.

Oh, see, this is exactly what I hate! As I’m writing this, I can hear my hard drive going. And the disk activity light is on solid. What’s going on? I have no clue! All I have open is Firefox. Some background process is apparently accessing my disk. What is it? I’m not quite sure!

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