On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Joseph L. Casale <JCasale at activenetwerx.com> wrote: >>which is about as useful as Microsoft Windows support... is it broken? >>"reinstall windows".... > > FFS, this attitude amongst opensource guys that MS is the devil and are > trying to murder your family or sabotage your life is such BS. I don't know what Microsoft's support is like for servers, but on the desktop they *definitely* tell you to reinstall for almost any major problem. I don't work on computers for a living anymore, but my wife is always telling people that I can help them when their Windows computers go down. An older lady at our church had a Vista machine go KSOD (black screen of death on her). It was a fairly new Dell. I called them and explained to them that I couldn't get it to boot -- they gave me instructions on reinstalling. Microsoft's support suggestion was to reinstall. I found out later why, there must have been 10 different ways to fix KSOD (that worked for some people but not others) and I tried every one. Finally using MSCONFIG I was able to open a "hive" (I've purposely avoided Vista so this is all new to me) and backed up the user directories to a portable hard drive. And then I did what I almost always have to do with Windows... reinstalled it. The KSOD "event" occurred after an automatic Windows update (which isn't all that uncommon I found out). > Take the Tin Foil Hat off and settle down, MS support is easily on par w/ > or *the* best support there is. Again, telling you to "reinstall" is not good support, in my opinion. > I maintain both Linux/Unix and Windows machines, and since high school days > I have been using PSS and there is nothing like it. They have have *ALWAYS* > fixed everything but one issue I have had, where that one issue I resolved > before them. Okay, what did they tell you about KSOD? Even if I can't fix it, I would at least like to know what really causes it. (There are a lot of theories out there.) > Spreading your FUD reflects on _you_ not MS. All he said is that they tell you to "reinstall" which is what they do. It's not FUD. > I love Linux (and prefer to toil in this forest) but don't preach that anti-ms > crap, its utter malarkey. Seems to me you're a little bit too sensitive here. I've reinstalled Windows on many personal computers for friends and family, and have seen many Windows computers "re-imaged" in the corporate environment. "Reboot" and/or "reinstall" are two of the most common "fixes" for Windows. This is not "tin-hat" malarkey, it's the simple truth -- and it's one of the big reasons I moved to Linux. -- RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3