I'd be curious to know how many "fixes" there were to Windows XP and if anyone at Microsoft honestly believes it will be better this time around with Windows 7. Windows XP was just fine until tens of thousands of fixes later our systems were so packed full of conflicting code that it just killed the systems. Many speculate that was by design to get us to buy new hardware and software. A clean install of XP with an OEM cd works great today. Only when you connect to some nazi network that hijacks automatic upates does it kill the system. Why this biggest company on the planet can't come up with something that just plain works gives rise to the credibility and integrity of the company. So how many gazillion patches should we expect to be dumped on us with Windows 7?

On Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:40:43 +0000, hmmmm..... _ wrote: I'd be curious to know how many "fixes" there were to Windows XP and if anyone at Microsoft honestly believes it will be better this time around with Windows 7. Windows XP was just fine until tens of thousands of fixes later our systems were so packed full of conflicting code that it just killed the systems. Many speculate that was by design to get us to buy new hardware and software. A clean install of XP with an OEM cd works great today. Only when you connect to some nazi network that hijacks automatic upates does it kill the system. Why this biggest company on the planet can't come up with something that just plain works gives rise to the credibility and integrity of the company. So how many gazillion patches should we expect to be dumped on us with Windows 7 I completely disagree with your point of view. Here's a quote from an article I once wrote (sorry that it's so long): Except for the trivial, there's no such thing as bug-free software. For some reason, most people don't understand this. They think they're entitled to get bug-free software, and they often dismiss a good product because they, or someone they know, had a problem with it. In a perfect world, of course, they would be right-bug-free software should exist, and everyone should expect and demand it. Why is it that all software has bugs? Why can't we ever have truly flawless programs? There are really two answers to those questions. One is the theoretical one; the other is the mundane, practical one of economic realities. The theoretical one is easy to understand: one can prove the presence of bugs, but never their absence. You find a bug by testing the software. If it doesn't work the way it's supposed to, you've found a bug. But suppose you run a test and everything works correctly. Does that show there are no bugs? Highly unlikely. It's far more likely that your test just wasn't thorough enough. Run more and better test cases, exercise the program more thoroughly, and you can always find more bugs. Today's programs are far more than sufficiently complex that more bugs can always be found if you test long enough, hard enough, and smart enough. Even if a program had no remaining bugs, one could never prove it; it is always possible that still another test will find still another bug. And in practice, it always does, if the testers are clever enough. What about the practical necessities of how software is tested? Bear in mind, first of all, that there are three groups of players in this game: the developers, the quality assurance team (the testers), and the marketing people. The developers are usually endowed with supreme confidence. When they write code, according to them it will work first time out. It's hardly even necessary to test, and it only should be done just to give everyone a little extra confidence in the product. The quality assurance people have been in this business for a while. QA knows there are bugs in the product, and delights in showing their superior skill and ever finding more bugs to prove to the developers that they don't know how to develop software. And the marketing people. The marketing people are concerned that the company is losing market share every day that the product doesn't ship. "Guys, we have to get this product out the door. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect. Few people will use that buggy feature anyway." So we have a triangle-each side with a different point of view, and a different axe to grind. Who wins out? Well, the strength of the sides clearly differs from company to company, product to product, situation to situation, and individual to individual. But in the long run, it's clear who eventually wins-it's always marketing. They win because they have to win, because ultimately they're rightyou have to get the product out the door sooner or later, or the company can't survive. You simply can't wait forever. QA can always find more bugs, and if you give them their head, they will test forever and the product will never ship. So what happens in practice? How are products tested, bugs found, and bugs fixed? The details of the procedure certainly varies from company to company, but most companies do something like the following. The software, once completed, goes through a round of testing. QA identifies a bunch of bugs, and those bugs are classified with respect to things like severity, user impact, frequency of occurrence, and difficulty of correction. The defect reports (description of the bugs) go back to the developers for correction. Some (for example, errors in spelling a message on the screen) are easy to correct, and can quickly be fixed even if their impact is slight. Others may take longer, some much longer. In some cases, the correction of an error may be so difficult, perhaps even requiring a major rewrite of a large portion of the software, that the developers rebel against fixing it at all. They may argue that the error occurs only in an exceedingly unlikely and infrequent situation. Like it or not, that argument is sometimes accepted. The exigencies of getting the product out the door sometimes demand that it be accepted. Nobody is particularly happy with that decision, but it is seen as the only practical thing to do. Sometimes it's the right decision; sometimes it's the wrong one. So some of the errors get fixed, some of the fixes are still being worked on, and other errors may be accepted as not worth the effort of fixing. The partially-corrected software now goes back to QA, and the whole process is repeated once more. Test, identify bugs, fix some of them, resubmit for testing, test, identify bugs, fix some of them, resubmit for testing... This sequence is repeated again and again until management decides that the product is good enough. It does not wait until there are no more bugs; it waits until that "good enough" stage has been reached. There is no alternative-it will never be perfect; QA can always find another bug if you let them run another test. So what is "good enough"? How do you know when that stage has been reached? Different companies, different people will answer that question differently, and even the same people will answer it differently at different times, in different situations. What goes into the determination? Questions like these: How many bugs still remain? What is their severity?. How frequently do they occur? What is the rate of finding new bugs-is QA still finding bugs at the same rate as they started to, or have they slowed down? Then there are the marketing questions. How late is the product? What is the competition doing? Is their product out yet? Is the competition's product stable or buggy? So sooner or later, rightly or wrongly, the product is released-and it always still has bugs. Some of those bugs are there because they haven't been found by the testers, others are known, and a conscious decision was made to ship the product with them remaining in it. What does this all mean? That all software is terrible and equally bad? Not at all. I began by saying that all software had bugs, not that all software is equally bad. One product has many bugs-another may have far fewer. Some programs have severe problems, perhaps completely crashing whenever an important feature is used-another may have mostly minor problems. Some software problems are hard to recover from-others have simple workarounds. Differences between software stability certainly exist, and those differences can often be dramatic. But perfection-the absence of all bugs-does not exist, can not exist, and will never exist. So, given that all software has bugs, a company that continues to test, find bugs, and fix bugs, even after the product is shipped, is doing a terrific job. And the more bugs they find and fix, the better the job they are doing. In addition to all the above, the activity of malware writers is always there, and is much greater than it used to be. That means that more and more patches are required to protect an operating system from malware. Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP

No appology needed on the length. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. What your article tells me is stuff goes out the door with known bugs. After all, if the people at Microsoft are smart enough to write it, they are smart enough to find the problems. I think we agree on that. You can't deny that all the patches destroy a system. I built a quad core extreme DDR3 system to run WinXPx64 and it worked great as a dedicated machine. Then 7 came out so installed Ultimate x64 using it as a dedicated machine. It runs Prime95 in perpetuity never missing a beat and it benchmarks >800fps on a gpu stress test. The patches for XP have destroyed everything else I own - five other systems. So I now use the quad core system for daily work. It's incredible how slow it is running with just a few applications open. As with every Microsoft OS install, I spent ten times longer uninstalling garbage than I spent installing the OS. All the games, snap, aero, peak, and all the stupid toys are gone. I open a stock chart, Excel, a few web browsers and it's stressing it. It's not crashing and I guess that's better than many people are reporting but it's still shocking to see that a brand new, clean install on the most advanced machine of the day is not performing 100% with just a few applications running. A few applications and a few hundred processes, that is. Not everyone is little Suzy blogging and snapping and peaking and aeroing and all that other trash you pack on there for the benefit of the advertisers and spammers on the internet. If is offensive to spend tens of thousands of dollars in capital and see the results of Microsoft's actions and inactions. You'll never convince me that Microsoft does not plant kill pills in the updates. Every business in America does it. Refrigerators used to run forever but then people stopped buying them, so they make them with shorter life spans today. Just like the cell company that sends you an over the airwaves "update" when you're "eligible for an upgrade". It's all fraud.