[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 02:18:19PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>ranting at how stupidly Windows does ... something.

The Wifi support in XP/SP3 is very good, far better than even MacOS, and miles
ahead of anything Linux.

>Yesterday's example is that Windows' handling of optical drives - in
>fact, of multiple drives and network volumes, PERIOD - is utterly
>broken.  

Works fine for me. One of the problems is that XP (and Vista) HOME version
has really bad networking. It's not a bug, it's a feature. XP and Vista
corporate works fine. I have shares on Windows computers, Linux computers,
and a Mac all mounted at once on the same Windows XP/SP3/Corp workstation
with no problems. I can add or remove shares as I want and they work fine.


>It is based upon the assumptions that no computer will ever
>have more than one optical drive, that said optical drive will always be
>built-in and present at boot, and that no computer owner will ever
>install additional hard disks that cause the drive letter assigned to
>any drive to change.  

I also don't have that problem. Many of my Windows computers have multiple
hard drives and multiple optical drives. Most of them have "traveling"
USB drives, usually memory sticks or MP3(ish) players. Occasionaly, they
all have had a portable USB DVD drive on them, and it has worked with
all of them.

Windows is based upon the concept that drive letters are assigned at boot
time, the boot drive is C, the first partition of each hard drives is then
added, then the optical drives, then each extra partition.

This can be easily modified by either GUI or command line to assign drive
letters to devices. Once assigned the drive leter sticks with that device,
until you assign another one. I don't know how to unassign a drive letter
completely (go back to dynamic assignment), but I'm sure it's been done.

The only thing I've ever had to do which was strange was to assign a drive
letter to drive D such as Z, and then move the drive I wanted to D, then
assign Z to where the old drive was.

As for network drives, you can assign then via the net use command via
the CLI and either have drive letters stick or not. I put a batch file
called setnet.bat in the root of the C drive of every computer I set up
which does the net use commands for me, if for some reason they are not
restored at boot time.

You can also turn on autoexec support, and make your mounts nonpermanent.
Then they disapear when you shut down, and if there are net use commands
in the autoexec, they will be mounted there.

Note that XP and Vista have a (free) add-on NFS client, which I have never
been able to figure out. Since just about every modern OS supports SMB/CIFS,
Windows will mount the read only or read write, with a minimal amount of
fuss.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM