With respect to Windows XP, I hear that Microsoft is due to release another Operating system.
Next year or so, so I have heard.
But, will this be a step up?, sideways or down?.
XP has it's faults, there's no secret about that, but will the new OS be any better?.
What would you like to see in the new version of Windows, apart from it not being Microsoft?.
Personally I'd like to see good on-board security, instead of having to download and install large Updates and Patches to fill the gaps that the original OS didn't have.
Your comments please?.

When will M$ release a smaller operating system? These things seem to want to be all things to all people so there are so many doors and windows into the guts that it becomes a security nightmare. If they would strip out about 99% of the bloat and make a lean and mean system for people who just want a safe browsing machine I would write Gates a check today.

Ohhh, let me see if I can think of something that bugs me about Microshaft... I mean Microsoft
What would I like to see in the next Winblows OS:

• Definitely an OS which is not such a dang CPU and DRAM hog,
• Less bloated,
• Not so anchored to the past,
• Quit being so afraid of some Home Office End-User having a copy of the same OS on a whole 3 Machines!! (give options to have upto 5 seat License for Home-Based LANs),
• Charge a little less money for OS and/or Applications - like make it worth the money paid!.

I have more, but my keyboard may be worn out by then

I like XP (have XP Pro). I liked Win 95 when it came out - quite a step forward from Win 3.xx.
95 OSR 2.5 made things even better... then came Win 98! eeegads, what a nightmare!
98 Second release worked much better.

Never dealt with Win ME.

Briefly dealt with Windows NT (3.5 and 4.0), along with Windows 2000 - these versions being on machines of Clients I had dealt with - etc. (have to include PC DOS, OS2 / OS2 Warp, and all that IBM stuff with the Clients' equipment too!).

I guess my main beef is obtaining a multi-seat licensed OS for my Home-Based LAN, and not spending a gazillion Dollars in the process!
Secondary beef would be multi-seat Licensed Office Package for same LAN, sans the $856,098,092.90 payment!

Scott35

Oooh. Rant mode = on

64-bit support is coming, and not a minute too soon. And support for the NX bit, on processors that support it.

I would like to see at last a proper implementation of privelege control levels. It would make the whole thing so much safer. Most other OSes have implemented it properly since the mid 1960s, but Windows dares not to because it will cause a huge number of older programs to break, if they are no longer allowed to run in the Administrator context. They will never get rid of their security issues, unless they do this.

Publishing the source code would be good, but not likely. I like being able to inspect the source of Linux.

Finer-grained modularity. Windows has always been 'all or nothing' -- if I want (for example) FTP services, I don't want to have to install a web server and LDAP rubbish too. It is risky and there is no technical justification for it.

Proper IPv6 support.

Proper firewall.

Get rid of the pretend microkernel.

Built-in C compiler.

A means of control over the scheduler, like 'nice' on UNIX etc.

I would like an end to this .NET rubbish; the continual retraining (DDE > OLE > OLE2 > COM > COM+ > DCOM > .NET architechtures, with the Int21h > Win > Win32s > Win32 >>> APIs, and all the dreadful class libraries -- MFC anybody??) put me off programming for Windows some years back.

Built-in support for testing automation.

A proper "industrial strength" text editor (something as powerful as emacs or vi)

Decent and lightweight scripting languages such as Perl or Python.

A proper shell in which one can do scripts fully functionally equivalent to the GUI.

Get rid of that fscking registry.

There is a theory that all good OSes eventually end up reinventing UNIX :-)

Those would be the things that brought me back to putting Windows on my CV for development contracts.

Nice to have:

A bigger selection of installable file systems.

A TP monitor and a built-in relational database would be cool.

Java support (I'm evil, I know :-) )

Better connectivity tools -- 3270 terminal program, an ssh client and server, a non-broken Telnet server, rcp support, X11 server and so on. At present I need to install Cygwin on all our servers to make them usable.

Most of all, "play nice" with other vendors, instead of deliberately putting obstacles in peoples' way all the time.

I don't ask much, do I :-)

Just an end to FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) In other words, change the entire development and marketing structure.

One word- PRIVACY.

Is there any reason the OS needs to keep records of EVERYTHING we do, every website we visit, every email in secret ultra hidden files (that even running DOS doesn't always uncover), in the registry and in other files not hidden at all?

Not to sound paranoid but is this a secret agreement Microsoft had with the FBI/CIA that would allow them to get information from a suspects computer?

While we are on the subject how about a delete that actually deletes a file by overwriting it with random data a few times.


-Hal

What the world needs, is a proper OS. Lets face it, Linux isn't exactly user friendly, but Windows is too user friendly. If windows wasn't always so open, it wouldn't be so vulnerable to attack.

Anyway, there is a new Microsoft OS coming, I believe it is called longhorn. Don't know much about it unfortunately. There has been a few beta's leaked, and some friends have used it, but remain unimpressed.

Hal hits a good, if not unfounded tangent in his post above.
If Microsoft actually stopped all the worrying about it's own OS, with respect to all the faults that can (and do) happen with it's OS, it would be a good system.
Take for instance, Internet Explorer, why is it that 50 Million downloads have taken place of the Firefox Browser, I would guess that these users were'nt downloading it for the sheer fun of it.
A lot of people that I've spoken to all have the same story, Microsoft is good, until you have a problem with it and then they don't want to know you.
Oh and by the way, my next PC is going to be Linux based.

how about the new os being a true mutliuser system supporting multiple logons simultaneously? Dump NetBEUI/NetBIOS.. useless protocols..

Oddly enough I read that the new M$ OS will have a new Black-box system built into it so that all keystrokes and websites visited and exactly what your computer was doing before it "failed" will be recorded and sent to M$ so thet:
That was from Bill Gates himself.
Btw, I reckon the name Longhorn is a stupid name for a computer Operating System.
Might be OK for Herd testing, but for an OS?
I can see the comments already, it's called that because it's full of Bull-***t

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 05-19-2005).]

Everything I can run on Linux, I do run on Linux. That's left less than a handful of things that still need Windows, none of which need any direct internet access (for the few files that go back and forth, they are transferred twice with one of the Linux desktops as the intermediary). So all the Windows stuff is on one computer still running an old obsolete Windows 98. So obviously I don't need to upgrade every time Microsoft wants me to.

As an old hand at Linux (since 1993) and even doing some development on it, I can't be a good judge of what is or is not user friendly to the average computer user. But I have tried installing some of the pre-packaged Linux "distributions" before with varying levels of success. A friend who actually wrote a book about how to use it recommended one that installed just fine with no need for me to intervene in any way (something I probably too readily do when I shouldn't). His book is about one called "Java Desktop System" from Sun Microsystems. The book at Amazon can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007523/103-1695720-7347815

I personally use a distribution called Slackware, which is the earliest distribution of Linux still available. I like it because it lets me dig in and change it around very easily. But this is probably not for you unless you also like to explore and tinker around with computer software.

I have been using Mandrake Linux for about a year now. My PC is a Win95-era machine, and when I had a hardware upgrade (more RAM + bigger HDD)the attempt to reinstall Win 98 failed and could not be persuaded to go. Mandrake loaded without a hint of a problem, and I've never really looked back since.

I have had a couple of problems, and in sorting them out I have found that although they seemed a bit daunting at first, when you actually delve into it the solution is not that difficult at all.

I bought the Mandrake Power Pack since at $NZ140 it seemed a fair price to me for a PC operating system, a large selection of pre-tested software, and access to support if needed.

Although I am operating in Linux-only mode, note that it is not necessary to boot Windows off your PC to try Linux. Most Linux distributions come packaged with a disk-partitiioning utility which lets you operate in dual-boot mode where you can select your operating system at boot-up time. There are also images available for download that you can burn to a CD to create a boot disk which contains the entire linux operating system and bundled software that all runs from just one CD.

For anyone who is curious about Linux, I do recommend that you have a play - its great fun, and it may well be the OS of the future.

Provided there is sufficient memory, VMWare can be very useful for supporting multiple OSs. http://www.vmware.com/

You can run Linux as the base OS, with all your regular apps, and then when you need to start up one of your windows apps, you just open a VMWare virtual machine session to boot copy of Windows XP/2000/2003/98 or whatever, and carry on as normal. The windows session can either run in full-screen mode or in a regular X-11 window under KDE/Gnome/some other window manager.

I have just installed six big linux servers at work which support three Windows 2003 test environments each, and they have been running like a dream. I wrote a few Perl scripts that control the Windows environments automatically (take down any of the environments, replace it with a clean one from a baseline archive, reset the Windows machine names etc, kick off the installation of prerequisite software eg SQL server, tar it back up, and deploy it on any of the physical machines). It is *far* easier than trying to do backups with Ghost and so on, and it has saved buying and installing a lot of extra hardware.

Dear Trumpy,

I try to solve the whole xp problem by learning several free softwares' using. Now I don't use linux anywhere, but I'll try to build a pc, put only linux on it and use self-made softwares or open source sw's for all my problem.