Hey Windows guys — this here is a huge rant. Just warning you now.
Today, I discovered my new Windows XP box had rebooted itself in the middle of the night, for some auto-update thing. Grr…. I gotta turn that off. I then decided to load in the rest that it was bugging me to do.
As always, it required a reboot. So I rebooted…
And now I can’t log in to the box.
I’ve been up way past my bedtime to fix this problem, and have been on the phone with Microsoft Helpdesk to solve it. So far, we’re busy running chkdsk.
I’ve rebooted zillions of times, launched into the recovery console, and used the Ultimate Boot Disk. I’m not sure what caused the problem. At this point, I don’t care. Linux doesn’t do this to me. Even apt-getting the entire shebang on unstable doesn’t do this to me.
I want my computer to just work. I don’t want to have it change and die… it’s just a huge waste of my time.
My Linux servers work… they’re reliable and don’t change, which is all I want from servers.
Windows guys — this is the value prop you need to hit. A stable server that doesn’t require reboots and won’t randomly nuke itself. Yeah, I know that’s what you’re striving to do, but the amount of interconnected glarp… for example, if the registry is corrupted / not there, everything grinds to a halt. With Linux, if a config isn’t there, one service won’t start. But unless you kill the right config, you can always boot.
Anyway, I’m tired and grumpy… let’s see if recovery won’t fix this problem.
Bah.