Hi I am looking for an over opinion. What is your views of Windows? The good and the bad. Security for me is a big issue with the Windows environment and the fact the system itself seems to get lagged and freeze up easily. Just looking for some opinions and how to get around these issues.

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You'll never need it, some of your favourite programs need it. If you can, if you're not tied down by other users, it'd be worth researching unix-os compatability/alternatives, or even if the programs you want work with wine.

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Windows is both good and bad. It really depends on what you are planning to do with your computer as to what OS you run on it. Most programs are built for Windows, which means that you must have a computer running windows. But there are exceptions, as toby said. If you use wine (Windows Software Emulator) you can run windows programs under a linux OS. Saying that, linux can be hard for beginners and can be very confusing. (you get the hang of it after a while )

As for the security issue, it is known that windows does have many security flaws, but in the many years I have been running windows, I've never had a problem (maybe I'm just lucky! ) Running a good firewall and anti virus package will reduce the possibility of having your computer hacked also.

The freezing and lagging problems will depend on the version of windows you are running (2000/XP/Vista) and how much RAM you have installed. For Win2k, 512mb was heaps, XP, 1GB and Vista, 2GB. Having enough memory will keep your computer running quickly and will stop it from freezing and lagging. But it also depends on what you are running while it lags. If you are playing games, you may find that upgrading the video card will make the game run better.

If you would like to give us some more information about your computer (Memory, what you plan to do, what OS you would be running etc) and we may be able to help you make a good choice.

 

 

 

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Windows Pros:
- better for gaming since most games were written for it
- easier to set-up
- more devices have official drivers written for it
Windows Cons:
- very buggy
- very bulky and sluggish
- you have to pay for it
- you are tied into a single vendor

UNIX/UNIX-like Pros:
- heavily customizable
- self-compilable
- you can really learn about computers with using these operating systems
- many to choose from
- not necessarily tied to a specific vendor. A software written for one UNIX system will most likely run on another with a few tweaks.
- tends to run faster and more efficient than Windows.
- UNIX variants like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and OpenSolaris are free!
- UNIX-like variants like Linux are free as well!

UNIX/UNIX-like Cons:
- lack of drivers for some or unofficial, reverse-engineered drivers
- cannot run Windows software, and using WINE (Windows software compatibility layer ... it's not an emulator!) may not always work.
- may be difficult to set-up but once set-up it's a breeze
- the choices of choosing different packages can be confusing for some

xboxrulz

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I have found that windows is unable to run multiple programs at the same time - it just freezes and becomes unresponsive, however this could be due to my system not being top notch but it is still quite good, and security issues with windows is atill a bit of a concern. The positive of windows is the sheer number of available programs, much more than mac or linux.

All in all windows is not a bad operating system - they have a good range of available programs but then again the security and freezing does cause a problem.

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I have been using Microsoft software for more than 20 years, Linux for 15. Both have undergone tremendous changes. If you want to use commercial application programs, there is almost no alternative to Windows. I make daily (often hourly) use of two Stock Market programs: Telechart and Tradestation. Together, they cost $130/month, so the cost of the operating system (and even the computer!) becomes small compared to their annual rental. However, they earn their keep in the tools they provide for analyzing stock, commodity and futures markets. Neither of these programs run in anything other than Windows -- not even Mac. Each of these platforms has its own, proprietary, programming language(s). Each also has a "Software Development Kit" which allows the skilled programmer to access the innards of the platform in C++, Python or his language of choice, given an even higher skill level.

If you insist on "open source" programs, you cannot take advantage of the tens of manyears of effort that have gone into developing these programs. On the other hand, there is really excellent open source software developed for more general purposes. K3b for burning CDs and DVDs, gimp for image manipulation and Linux itself come immediately to mind. If you want a more specialized application, you may have to write it yourself.

Fortunately, there is a convergence. It is via "virtualization." Linux, Windows or Mac can be a "host," and it can run virtualized copies of Linux and Windows, simultaneously, inside the host. That means you can, for example, have a Linux, open-source host running itself, one or more copies of Windows, and even other copies of Linux, and probably (though I have not seen this) Mac "guests."

Several years ago, a research project in England (Xen) bore fruit in the design of hardware that could run virtualized software at near-native speed. That is, the "guest" operating system could run applications almost as fast as if the "host" operating system were not present. About a year ago, both Intel and AMD added these hardware instructions to their CPUs and the motherboard support chips.

It takes a fairly powerful computer to run multiple virtualized operating systems. In particular, each virtual OS and the host all have to have their own dedicated part of RAM. However, once a system is virtualized, it can very easily be moved from one computer to another.

How easy, was demonstrated by Novell about a year ago. (I just went looking for the web link and couldn't find it.) In their demo, they had a web server running on one virtual machine, serving streaming video to a number of users. They moved the server software from one physical computer to another, without losing any video streams! I find that very compelling because I have moved a partition containing many interdependent applications from one physical computer to another, because the hardware in the first computer was dying, at least 6 times in the past 10 years. Each time, it has taken from a day to a week to locate and integrate all the different hardware "drivers" for the new computer, and get them working with my software.

In my study of virtualization, I have learned that Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista all have a "hardware abstraction layer," HAL.DLL, to the specialized hardware drivers. Virtualization software replaces what is below HAL, making the move from one virtual environment to another (once you have gotten there in the first place), very easy. I just checked SuSE, using a simple script "ps -ef | grep -i hal" and found that it has a "hald" which is probably a HAL daemon, so the same principle probably works in Linux.

My conclusion is that you will probably be able to run whatever you want in a single computer soon. Whatever is easiest for you to use can be run virtualized in a single computer.

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For compatibility issues, I think what you want is Windows XP. With a firewall, anti-virus, a secure browser (Opera/Firefox) and a couple of antispyware software, the computer can be more secure. To prevent programs from freezing, monitor your system resource usage through Task Manager and apply tweaks to registry settings as necessary.

For security and performance, you may want to look towards a different type of operating system called "Linux". It is based in UNIX, and has few (if any) security holes in it. For a first-time user, I would recommend Ubuntu (there are many distributions of Linux available, Ubuntu is probably the easiest one). The major issue with Linux is that is isn't compatible with much of the commercial software available today, but there are many free alternatives. If you want to play commercial games on Linux though, that is almost not a option because they are designed for Windows (and sometimes Mac) only.

There's 2 further opinions to consider. Hope this helps.

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Docduke, as much as hardware virtualization, most hardware is still having trouble running virtual machines at near native speeds. My system is a dual core Athlon 64 X2 processor (4200+) with 4GB of RAM on Windows Vista and the virtual machine (be it Windows or Linux) are still significantly slower than running it natively. Until everyone runs a quad-core system, I don't see many people use virtualization except in the business/server sectors.

I'm going to get a quad-core and this is one of the reasons why I would get it; for virtualizing the system so I can run Linux and Windows at the same time. If I want to run Linux, BSD and Windows, well I would need an even better machine, which I won't be able to afford.

As for HAL, yes Linux and Windows had HAL for a long time. On Linux and other UNIX systems, it is handled by hald (HAL Daemon). It made hardware management so much easier and it also allowed ejecting the optical drive tray without manually unmounting first possible.

Anyways, this is no place to talk about virtualization. We can continue this topic on another thread.

xboxrulz

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Windows operating systems are good for general use because many commercial programs are designed mostly to run on Windows natively, and don't need emulators (e.g. Wine) to run these programs. Without using an emulator, there are significant speed improvements to program usability.
However, using Linux is better on the security side as Linux is less exposed to malware and vulnerabilities that Windows operating systems are subject to.

On the topic on virtualisation, Windows Server 2003 runs quite well in a virtual machine on my Pentium 4 machine, and is significantly faster compared to running Windows XP in a virtual machine.

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