Apple plugs 25 Mac OS X flaws

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The kind of flaws that matter...

And how many security flaws has Windows patched in that period?

But I've been waiting for the benefit of your expertise, Lovey. Let's digress for a moment so I can mention - vent - a few of the reasons "security" is only one of the reasons Microsoft has well and truly earned the contempt of their customers:

My personal machine is a six-month-old Core 2 Duo 6600 with the appropriate bells and whistles, running fully-patched XP Pro SP2. Ever since I added a wireless Bluetooth keyboard & mouse, it's been bluescreening once or twice a week with a Bluetooth driver error message, and about as often making me reconnect the mouse or keyboard. (Remember when Microsoft decided Bluetooth wouldn't amount to much and didn't bother writing drivers that worked? Kinda like when they thought the same about USB, which is why we're still installing an extra workaround to get USB 2.0 working on a clean install.) I would have upgraded to XP x64 by now, except that a side effect of patch Tuesday before last was to wipe out about 20GB of recently moved data, including all the 64-bit drivers I had downloaded for everything else.

A week or so ago, it started randomly disabling peripherals and reconfiguring my desktop - little things like loading a different desktop theme or moving the taskbar from the primary monitor to the secondary or back again.

The first few days, booting into the setup screen and choosing "Last Good Configuration" got things back on track; then for a few days System Restore actually worked (as long as I remembered to set a restore point for the "AMFU").

The last couple of mornings, I've had to reinstall the keyboard, and the TV tuner, which had decided it liked SnapStream better than the ATI software, has decided it just doesn't like anything.

And this morning I get a two-fer: System Restore develops its own set of "creative" configurations, and the keyboard is completely disabled when I boot into the setup screen, which means don't even think about Safe Mode or Last Good Configuration.

OK, we obviously have some file corruption problems. Remember when the Win 95 install disk had an option to "Repair Windows"? But with 98, MS decided that it was so perfect no one would ever need to repair Windows - so my options are to break into a command prompt and start re-writing MS's garbage code myself, or just give up and waste a couple of days of my time reinstalling Windows, peripherals and software - after making sure all critical data is backed up on the second physical drive which is physically unplugged before I start reinstalling, since we've learned the hard way that Windows may well decide that I really don't want to just reformat the C: partition and do a boot-sector reformat and wipe the whole physical drive. And if I get a good install the first time - another random process - I should get another six months or so before it all starts again.

I'm sure your reaction will be your standard Reply #3 - "It's jsut a minor little problem and a professional like me would have no trouble making the necessary adjustments". Which, as usual, would miss the point: Why - other than Microsoft's incompetence - is any of this aggravation and wasted time necessary in the first damned place?

I'll tell you exactly what I and most of Microsoft's other customers really want: It's not a "cool"-looking Aero interface or even an allegedly-more-secure (and already proven wrong) "kernel protection". What I want Microsoft to give me for my money is simply a *#(&)%(&#))**#*$#*#$*!!!!! OPERATING SYSTEM THAT WORKS RELIABLY AS ADVERTISED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: deleweye   Posted on: 04/23/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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