Totally OT, but frustrated.....

[Jules Richardson]

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 23:48 -0500, David V. Corbin wrote:
> But some of the things that strike me are.....
>
> It STILL takes the same amount of time for a system to boot..

Thin clients do a little better usually. Beats me what the heck a modern
PC's BIOS does on startup by the way to make it take so long.

> It STILL takes the same amount of time to format a disk..

Unless you're on a thin client...

> It STILL takes the same amount of time to install a (basic) OS

Umm... thin client...? ;)

> It STILL takes the same amount of time to customize the OS

Hmm, on a > 1 scale a you-know-what can be useful there too as the
customisation's only done once.


Don't things like Norton Ghost take care of imaging a Windows OS between
machines? Or do they only work when the source and target drives are the
same size?  And of course in the Unix world cloning a disk is easy as
all the tools are already there.

Bad block checking at OS install time is a necessity though - only
solution I can think of there is to keep the OS on a small drive or
partition. 

Memory tests on a "real" system need to be thorough at boot time too for
obvious reasons; no way around that unfortunately - although an OS that
had the option of testing memory that it needed to load into then
background-testing the rest post-boot *might* be handy to people. Of
course servers that need x MB of memory usually start up all the
services that require that much memory at boot time, so it doesn't help
much. Different for desktops though; 90% of the time I'm using about 30%
of the RAM in this PC...


I miss the days of the 8-bit "desktop" machines (CMB/Sinclair etc.) -
turn it on and it's ready, no messing around...

cheers

J.