Quote Originally Posted by Falconius View Post
Or, you can trade them both for Linux problems. No OS is perfect..
How true! Who has the biggest problems? Windows users? Mac users? LINUX users? Who knows? However, regardless of which OS one prefers, users of Windows programs such as CC3+ and FM8 will do themselves no favors by switching to a Mac or a LINUX system. FM8 users seem to get along fairly well with Windows emulations on a Mac. (There's no guarantee that'll be true with FM9, however.) It's quite a different matter with a Mac running a Windows emulation and CC3+. I worked with the Mac users on ProFantasy's official beta testers roster, and even with some refined workarounds, there are some things in CC3+ that just don't work.

But the OS is only one problem. Another problem is the tendency of a few brand-name computer manufacturers to design machines and BIOS systems that don't comply fully with the OS manufacturer's standards. Instead of doing that, they want to build a better mouse trap and then flop when a new kind of mouse comes around. Here in Germany, Siemens PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s were delivered with Siemens' own tailor-made version of MS-DOS. Where the original MS-DOS was installed from a single floppy disc, the Siemens version came on three floppies. When Microsoft updated original MS-DOS 3.0 to 3.1, the Siemens BIOS wouldn't boot Microsoft 3.1 and there was no Siemens 3.1. Stick with 3.0, Siemens said. Nice, except that the current versions of some popular software programs that were released after the introduction of MS-DOS 3.1 wouldn't run on Siemens 3.0, although they ran on Microsoft 3.0. When MS-DOS 4.0 came out, the same thing happened all over again. (Siemens has been out of the PC business for some time now.)

In the particular case in question in this thread, the computer that had the problems came from HP. HP and Dell are two companies that also are known for brewing their own beer on Windows PCs and then becoming somewhat incompatible when either Windows itself or a 3rd party Windows program updates. After that, the new version either doesn't run quite right or not at all. After HP acquired Compaq, there were some i486 Compaq models that couldn't manage memory right anymore and crashed constantly after updating to Windows 95. The customer had only two choices: Go back to Windows 3.1 or go to the more expensive Windows NT 4.0. HP never fixed this.