[rescue] Oh yeah ...

[Phil Stracchino]

Ethan O'Toole wrote:
>> Yup.  I'm being freshly reminded how painful XP is, with the bling that
>> you can't disable and assorted management settings obfuscated and tucked
>> away in hard-to-find places.  Tracking down the interface settings and
>> setting for performance-over-shiny helps.  But there's still way too
>> much bloat and bling and unnecessary space-wastage in the interface.
> 
> There are ways to trim all of that out.

*All* of it?  I have most of it disabled, but "My Network Places" takes
twice as many clicks to actually reach anything useful as Win2K's
"Network" tool, and it's stuffed full of intrinsic gibberish.  What the
heck is a "web client network" supposed to be that's different from a
"Microsoft Windows Network"?  Does it use a different kind of electrons
or something?  I will never understand why Microsoft has such a
compulsion to pointlessly obfuscate networking.  It's almost as though
they don't WANT their customers to understand.
And then there's the "improved" XP "My Computer" window, which now
requires almost half an XGA laptop screen to show me one hard disk, one
network drive, two virtual CD drives, and a couple of folders I don't
even care about, much less want to see there.

It was bad enough when MS added multiple toolbars, address bars, and
about a gazillion buttons to every folder window.  Does *anyone* ever
actually USE any of that crap?  Fortunately they made it easy to turn
them off.


>> And then I remember that Vista is WORSE.  WTF was Microsoft thinking?
> 
> Linux has followed the same path. You can trim out the extra stuff in both 
> OSes.
> 
> Check out XP Embedded for some odd stuff.

I'm not planning on keeping XP on this machine any longer than it takes
for me to figure out a way to do a clean dual-boot OS reinstall on it.
Not least because I have no XP media, so if this copy of XP shoots
itself in the head (as Windows periodically does), I have no way to
reinstall it even if I did have an optical drive for the machine.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.