Originally Posted by
DougGuy
Hehe, years ago I looked up kernel32.dll errors, guess what was the cause of 97% of them? Other M$ products! I kid you not. There were hundreds of pages of hits on this one error, and dozens of the pages were ALL caused by Office and it's various components. You had to scroll and scroll and scroll to find kernel32.dll errors caused by other applications.
Now.. I used to do a robust business keeping windows machines stable and running, I would build an image from an installed version, complete with added applications, include the windows CD on the root of the drive, strip out all the hardware, uninstall EVERYTHING in device manager (which we lovingly called device mangler), then shut down and ghost this to an .iso file, and burn it to a bootable CD. All you had to do was stick the cd in the drive, turn the machine on, and sit back and watch it go hunting for new hardware and installing drivers, etc, we nicknamed the image JAWS because it came up snapping for drivers and resources. It didn't need windows installed, all it needed was a hard drive with an active primary partition on it, and it would find it and off to the races it went! It was almost funny to watch.
XP.. Some folks got the same ideas I had, and they would use a program to remove windows components from XP, then burn this as a new .iso file and post it on the newsgroups. You download it, burn it to CD, boot from it and install a stripped down race ready version of XP that had all the eye candy and bloatware ripped out of it. The whole .iso was only 184mb, and the installed footprint was 585mb on hard drive, and it RAN LIKE A RACE HORSE! Very stable, very fast. Basically all you had was a primer gray car with all the money under the hood. What could be better? They did a windows 7 version too that reacted the same way.
I had long hoped that M$ would have the sense to compartmentalize things and let the user login, choose which features they wanted, then M$ would figure the dependencies, include those in the build, then you pay for your .iso and download it, much like FreeBSD. No need for all the garbage and bloatware which sickens every version of windows ever released, and instead of letting you have a powerhouse computer with quad cores and lots of ram, they bog it down with evreything running at once, they could take the most powerful Intel processor and slug it down to the speed of a 486.