I had an experience over the weekend that got me thinking about the reputation that windows has managed to get itself for being unreliable, and not particulary powerful. The experience? Trying to fix my nieces DVD drive.

Basically the drive had stopped working, it wasn’t being recognised by the OS, but the hardware was still recognised in the BIOS and was still spinning up OK on boot. The problem? A dodgy registry key left

behind by some old third party CD software, something easy to find on Technet. Before fixing it though, I had been talking to one of the family who was trying to fixing it, and he was suggesting a full-on repair/rebuild of the machine in order to solve the problem.

Later on, this got me thinking…has Windows got itself a reputation because of the lack of education of it’s users (i.e not fully understanding the OS and how it works) or is it genuinely as bad as people make out?

My point is this, if Mac’s, or Linux or whatever was used by as many people as windows, and they had the same amount of knowledge as your typical Windows user, would they be as rated as they are? Typically,

every Mac or Linux user I know fully understands the machine and how it works, and how to get the best of it. Likewise, I fully understand my windows laptop, it’s nice and quick, and never crashes on me (nope, not even the software), but is that because of the fact that I know how to use it properly.

Now, I should point out that I am not some huge Windows advocate, it just fits my needs, I’ve used Linux and a Mac in the past, but right now, Windows is for me. But, if you were to give a Mac or Linux box to someone like my Grandad, who can crucify electronics at 50 paces, would he be able to work the machine as well as a Windows PC, and thus kill it in the same amount of time?