An official slightly off topic anouncement

[Lorenzo Taylor]

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I guess it's all a matter of how much a Windows XP user uses the
computer.  I have heard that Windows XP can run for weeks at a time, but
it never happened for me.  I once got XP to run 5 days straight, but
that was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrance for me.  I guess it's because I
kept my computer on all the time like I do now.  I was trying to run a
very small web site with very few hits, an ftp server with just a few
files on it and very few hits and a personal mail server just to get my
own mail.  This was actually running on XP pro and rarely ran for 2 days
before crashing and burning.  This is why I just can't recommend using
Windows of any kind in a server environment.  My problems decreased when
I switched from an aging computer to the latest AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with
512 MB of RAM which was pretty much top-of-the-line at the time, but
they didn't go away completely.  At that point the system didn't bomb
every time I tried to access the mail server's web page, but it still
crashed about once every 2 days or sometimes more often.  And JAWS even
brought that computer to a very slow crawl after it had been running for
more than about 2 hours using about 95% of system resources.  My only
remedy for this was to quit JAWS and restart it, which usually brought
the system back to life for another 2 to 3 hours, but usually less the
more I did it.

Now on Linux I do a lot more.  I run actually 4 different web sites,
still small with few hits but more of them and I also run an ftp server
with many more and bigger files on it than I ever had running Windows
XP.  I also run a personal mail server to send and receive my own mail
on 3 addresses with the ability to add an unlimited additional number of
addresses.  I also run an NFS server to allow me to copy my files to and
from my laptop.  And not only do I run Speakup, but I also run Orca with
the full Gnome GUI and sometimes I even use FireFox 3.0 with the latest
Orca to browse the web.  It's quite nice, BTW.  After all this and more,
it is still possible for my system to be up for 2 months or more without
a single crash or other problem that necessitates a reboot.  And this
was true on my old Athlon XP system with 512 MB of memory as well as it
is true on my new AMD Athlon64x2 system with 1GB of ram.  Most reboots
were caused by my desire to live on the bleeding edge and always upgrade
to the latest kernel.  Of course to use the new kernel, the system must
be rebooted.  But I have learned to tame down that desire somewhat and
for the most part I just use Ubuntu and upgrade/reboot on the new
release.  This means it may actually be possible to reboot my computer
only once in a 6-month period.  WOW!  In Windows XP that was unheardof.

Just my own personal experience for what it's worth, your mileage may
vary.

Lorenzo
- -- 
I've always found anomalies to be very relaxing. It's a curse.
- --Jadzia Dax: Star Trek Deep Space Nine (The Assignment)
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