the recovery thing varies as to how much hard drive space you allow it to use I think.

 

also as has been mentioned, the GUI is fully customisable. you can easily turn it back to the classic windows look, or do some really really nifty things with it,

 

http://www.tweakxp.com

Classic Windows Desktop++

 

Grey's my kind of colour.

Originally posted by MrL_JaKiri

(what OS comes without a disk defragmenter, for god's sake? Especially one with an HDD as small as in the iMac; if hard drive space is at a premium it's a vital app, surely?).

One that doesn't use a fundamentally broken file system?

 

Why support an OS with less compatability and less stability?

I've never experienced any stability problems, but let's assume I have, for the sake of discussion. Is rock-hard stability really such a high priority? If my system goes down once a month, I don't really mind. On the other hand, OS X provides a much better UI, which is what you're dealing with constantly, and that's very important; I'd argue it's the most important property of a desktop operating system.

 

What else do you want in an OS?

A nice GUI, good developer support, a good shell, compatibility with Unix applications, etc.

Originally posted by phubuh

One that doesn't use a fundamentally broken file system?

 

So what you're saying is

 

Disks become fragmented because they use NTFS.

 

Right.

 

ps.

 

The UI is very good in XP, I find.

 

And if I want to run unix applications I'll use RedHat, ta.

The linux operating system's file allocation system automatically places the empty file fragment at the end of the table, as Windows 9x's kernel doesn't re-allocate it's files, which allows for more portability(makes it so win9x can use the same drivers for a number of HDDs. Linux may be a bit harder to set up than windows, but if you want an efficient system, *nix is the only ones left.

 

Win2k is also nice, but still doesn't allocate the file fragments as well as linux/BSD.

 

Oh, and to clear this up. Darwin(OS X) isn't as Unix-based as people claim. The kernel uses BSD objects, but it's process handler is still Apple-based, which defeats the whole purpose of using Unix's file system.