In Defense Of Windows

One of the main advantages for windows is that backwards compatibility is excellent (I can generally run programs for Win95 without getting into some weird dependancy hell) and I have never had a big update (like a service pack) totally break everything like I have had with pretty much every linux distro I have ever tried.

One thing I never really understand is why people complain about windows RAM usage, especially on recent versions. RAM is cheap and you have about 8GB of it , why are you complaining about it showing usage of 2GB after boot? You didn't buy all that memory for it not to be used, surely most of this usage is due to windows preloading commonly used DLLS into memory at bootup so parts of the system can load faster?

I heard at one point that data to be preloaded is deliberately organized into contiguous blocks on disk so it can be read quickly in one pass, giving an overall performance win vs seeking all over the disk later trying to load in bits of DLLS to run a program?

I'm sure somebody can correct me on the details of that.

I'm not sure the security argument is even particularly valid anymore, is there really any concrete reason that a Unix OS has an inherent advantage over an NT based system?

I think allot of the issues stem from the culture (or pherhaps lack of it). Linux users are generally happy with their open source software from aptitute , whilst Mac users only tend to use a small number of good quality commercial apps. On the other hand a huge number of windows apps seem to be 'freeware' type apps that make their money by bundling crapware, also there is more pirated software used which I suppose would be more likely to have viruses bundled. I generally stick to either open source or fully paid up commercial software on my Windows 7 box and I've not had any real problems.