"I've Had It With Windows" rant

[Richard Hubbard]

Definitely worth ranting about, but i think you have to install...(you'll
love this)..Outlook.  There is a mapi.dll and a mapi32.dll, however, we all
know how straightforward windows is with it's installs, it won't be just
copying these dll's into the \windows\system directory to get them to work.
They have to be registered in the registry, and who knows what else.

You won't have to _use_ Outlook, so virus problems should be minimized, but
you will have to install it.


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nflug at nflug.org [mailto:owner-nflug at nflug.org]On Behalf Of
Gregory J.Neumann
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 11:25 AM
To: nflug at nflug.org
Subject: "I've Had It With Windows" rant


At work, I'm forced to run Win98.  I have the network server running
Slackware Linux / Samba, but this workstation is Win98.  And I've had
it!!  I run a lean machine.  I uninstall all the Win98 "enhancements" and
every option that supposedly makes it "user friendly" but slows the
machine 10-15% just to save a few keystrokes or minor brain usage. Bonus
is that the less of the "incestuous intertwining" I have enabled, the
longer I go between BSOD's!  Now I have a little program that wants
"MAPI" services to do it's upload thingie.  Well, M$ support show NOTHING
when searching for it, except the name mentioned in a couple of articles,
"Windows Help" is (no surprise!) clueless on it, and even the 1400+ pages
of the "Windows 98 Resource Kit" book only gives you the name!  The
"best" advice I've gotten so far is "All you need is a MAPI enabled
e-mail client."  Well, between StarOffice and Netscape, that's 2, and
neither one of them help!!!

My rant is this:  In Linux, there's HOWTO's , man pages and great places
like this.  I could be totally clueless about MAPI this morning and by
afternoon know exactly what processes on my Linux box need it, how to start
it, stop it and even what it does!  So, where in the <expletives deleted>
is the vaunted M$ tech support that's so superior to Linux???  :-P

Guess I have to buy a new computer so I can get equivalent performance
and have the problem "fixed" by XP? ;-)

Thanks for the rant time.
Greg

"The network is down!  But I feel better" -Dogbert