Windows NT woes, switching to Linux

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Today I decided to just remove Windows NT "Advanced" Server 3.5 from a
local server machine, and switch it to Linux.  No more multibooting.

Because ... you may remember I was having board problems with my
Ethernet.  Well, turns out that the Ethernet board was fine, the
motherboard's I/O is hosed.  (DEC gives a 3-year warrantee, I'm happy ;-)

The Linux drivers quite properly noticed that there wasn't a
functioning board there and refused to load.  The NT driver (probably
supplied by the board mfr, I doubt that can be blamed on MS) loaded
anyway.  Then NT proceed to go all 'okashii'.  Logging in was
difficult (you had to type the password, then wait for the window
manager to *not* initialize, and then interrupt its failure to
initialize with a 3-finger salute to get it to initialize---that
trick, needless to say, is not in the manual and was discovered by
accident), logging off and shutting down impossible without a hardware
reset, and any admin function that touched the driver hung (most of
them do poll the drivers).  This meant that you couldn't uninstall the
driver from NT except by renaming the .SYS file with File Manager!
(That trick is not in the manual, either.)

Just Say No to "robust" OSes from Microsoft!  Linux Rules!

If you can't do that (I guess NT does symmetric multiprocessing pretty
well, and the NTFS apparently is pretty nifty, handling RAID etc, but
I don't have the hardware to take advantage of either feature), maybe
this little story will save you some grief.

I do plan to inform Microsoft; maybe they'll fix it, maybe they
already have (I have v3.5, I think there's a v3.51 or so by now).  I
don't think I'll bother to reinstall, though.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com