Quote: "siriasly considering dumping windows (slow and continuasly crashes, refuses to shut down ext)"
Regular maintainance, and malware checks help greatly with performance and reboot issues. Windows XP especially requires atleast weekly defragmentation and clean-up just to make sure it keeps running quickly.
DO NOT use Norton, or McAfee for your Malware protection. They only offer protection against the common attacks and will kill performance. Not to mention cost quite a bit to renew each year.
Microsoft have released their own, called Live! OneCare. There's a free trial version, that lasts for 90-days. It only takes minimal resources, in-fact in terms of resources it actually runs lighter than NOD and AVG; plus protects against more potencial attacks. It is also updated daily, so if a new vunerability is discovered you can guarentee within 24hrs you will be protected from it.
Quote: "[quote]The drivers fail and vista recovers them, its awesome."
My Kubuntu does that also, it recovers every file, keeps backups, so in the worse black-out case, you lose nothing, and your hard-drive is fine.[/quote]
System restoration isn't new, and Vista's version of Shadowcopy has actually been part of Office since 2000. Just done on a system-wide scale now. This said that isn't what Steve was talking about.
I've experienced what he is talking about recently (as in yesterday) because my GPU fan has just given up, which in demanding 3D tasks causes it to overheat very quickly.
In Windows XP this would mean BSOD pop-up and system reboot. For Vista this isn't the case, the video driver will crash then reinitialise itself. Alright so for Linux users, this is possible too although in my experience most distros will crash Windows-X and force you to log-in as Root(Admin) to manually correct the problem. What Linux users definately don't get however is a fully useable desktop as Windows drops back to the default system driver, and then also provides you with a report of what the fault could possibly be caused by.
On Windows XP, or Linux it would've taken me weeks to notice the cause of the problem my GPU has. With Vista, I noticed the moment it happened the first time without any disruption to my actual work.
Quote: "Happens to me too, if you keep any version of windows for longer then 3 months, it decides to die. I usually wipe my windows harddrive every 4 months, but it seems to get worse every time."
As I said above, regular maintainance and this doesn't happen.
I have a Windows XP machine at my brothers, which for 2years was rarely turned off and maintainance was rarely needed. It was basically used exclusively for games, music and video.. not connected to the internet in any form. So that probably helped keep it fairly clean and tidy anyway - still it's not often Windows fault that it gets the way it does, more peoples' useage. Particularly those who regularly download crap from the internet, or even browse online a-lot. That's when you need very regular maintainance.
As far as the first question goes though. Cedega(unless they've changed the name again) is by far the best option when it comes to Windows DirectX8/9 emulation. Don't expect reasonable performance though.. it's far worse than Windows Vista using RTM drivers.
