You are the person I'm talking about when I say that people that blame Windows for problems are their own worst enemy, and it's way worse when Dunning-Kruger is in full effect as well...

> Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause ntdll to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause Windows activation to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause shutdowns to take hours instead of seconds. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause suspend to spontaneously bork.

Inexperience causes all these things. Listen, my experience goes way, way beyond 'anecdotal' when it comes to managing end users running Windows. Never, ever, ever with the exception of a small handful of updates, does Windows fundamentally break itself. When you see a bluescreen, 100% of the time it is your fault or it's your hardware's fault. 100% of the time. Sometimes it might look like it's not your fault. Sometimes it's McAfee removing important files that break the OS because it's being stupid, but that's not a Window's problem.

If shutdowns are taking awhile, something is broken. Your inability to diagnose that isn't the fault of the OS. Ever.

If your computer 'suddenly borks', then your hardware failed, or you are bad at computer. 100% of the time.

If you can't manage to upgrade Windows, than I can't help you. Someone did it from 1.0 to 6.2 in a straight shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE

When stuff like this happens:

> According to jjoonathan, the ntdll segfaults started happening after an update

It usually means that some third party software, usually legacy/dated drivers or your AV solution, has fucked up. The aforementioned McAfee bug is pretty famous for that, which you can read about here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/mcafee_false_positiv...

Your inability to diagnose the problem isn't the fault of the OS.

The half dozen Windows computers I own and the close to 600 I manage never, ever have these problems that seem to plague other people who seem to insist 'it's just Windows'. So, why is it that my customers never have these problems that you insist are ubiquitous to the platform? It'd be because I can manage them. I can leverage GPO to make sure my AV solutions at least report when it's doing something fishy. I monitor my computers so when something bluescreens, I get a copy of the dmp file and I can peel through it immediately. I don't let my users have unrestricted access to absolutely everything. I can use and manage the OS and leverage the extremely potent tools Microsoft gives me to diagnose problems and use that knowledge to prevent problems in the future.

And here's the thing: I don't really enjoy white-knighting Windows, but I also really don't enjoy people in the field of IT acting like Zealots in regards to products and platforms they don't know anything about.

I'm not a huge fan of Linux. I'm not a big fan of how esoteric the OS is and how management is unintuitive and complex. I'm not very good at fixing the problems that show up on the platform because quite frankly, I'm just not experienced enough to take any problem and pave a path to a solution. I've sworn more at my SAN running Openfiler because of Openfiler than I care to admit and if I could do it all over again, I'd never have put Openfiler on that box, but here's the thing: I'll never say, 'Linux is bad' or 'Linux isn't stable' or 'Holy shit I'm so mad at OpenFiler because if you have an iSCSI implementation and your boot device fails, your arrays are fucked unless you can rebuild', because I'd be speaking from misunderstanding, inexperience, and an incomplete understanding of the tools I'm using and I might look like an idiot by saying as much.