>>IMO, though, Win3.11 for Workgroups was as stable, if not more so, than W2K.
>>JLK
>
>Jerry,
>
>With all due respect, that is a S-T-R-E-T-C-H! <g>
>
>General protection faults were a regular occurance (sometimes many times a day) in WFW.

It depended a lot on the video card and driver more than anything else. I was and am very careful about which ones I choose, when it is up to me.
>
>Each generation has been an improvement. And since I moved from Win98 to W2K, forced reboots have been rare. I can't help be think your current situation with W2K is not the norm...unfortunally a total reinstall is the only way to fix these problems (I know. It's a beating).

You must have worked as an MS support person (Reboot or reinstall) :) From my experience the instability increased significatly going from Win3.11 to Win95.


>
>And though I probably never brought the Linux kernal to its knees, I certainly have brought the GUI (GNOME, or whatever) to its knees...and had to kill it and restart the GUI environment.

No doubt about that. But, I've yet to see an app penetrate the OS ring.

>
>I guess my Linux experience hasn't been as rosy as yours. BTW, my experience is with RedHat...I don't think that should be terribly relevant, except for differences in the installation process.


I started with RH 5.0. A very nice package. But, subsequent releases, especially 5.1 were a disaster. That's why I switched to SuSE in Sept of 97. Since then I haven't been disappointed. I especially like the ReiserFS. You can yank the plug out of the wall, stick it back in and be up without a file system or corruption problem, in my experience. We've had SuSE 6.4 with ReiserFS running in our server room since Last September without a single problem. It runs a mission critical tax document retrieval and supply service to the public via phone access. It has two phones and switches over automatically. Each of the tax preparers have their own account and passward, and files from the IRS are distributed automatically. I did the whole thing with only three scripts, each less than a page long. Two in bash, one in python.


>
>What Office suite do you use? I tried Star Office, and found it to be quirky and unpredictable at best.

I had use WordPerfect 8.0, but have switched to SO 5.2 because of all of its features. It loads in about 15 secs on my box. (1GHz-512MB RAM), and just like Word, I know where the land mines are and how to avoid them. I like the fact that I can create a db and access it with forms, reports, queries, much like Access. I can browse the web seamlessly and answer email and newsgroups. SO 5.1 had some annoying bugs, especially in the way email msgs were saved to folders, but those were smoothed out in 5.2. I am waiting for SO 6.0, which just announced a coming release, the first from Open Office. Will be interesting.

But, I eventually plan to switch totally to KOffice. I use KMail mostly, along with KNode (news). KWord is getting very nice. So is KSpread, and the others. The best WP at reading Word docs is AbiWord, which uses an XML format.