Goodbye, Restart.

In today's customer-driven market, we are told that we should spoil customers. As a customer, I have always thought that Windows XP did pretty well in wowing me. Today I just shake my head for being so ignorant!

In Windows, we had no choice but to live with that annoying time-consuming [insert first bar of Beethoven's 5th here] -- Restart Sequence. The Restart Sequence is Microsoft's way of telling Windows, "Look, we just changed something and to make you realize it, we have to clean up the slate and start everything all over again."

To put it in proper perspective, Restart is like, well, like forcing Madame Auring to be reborn every time she got a facelift. All Windows users have had to live with Restart. I can think of these situations that need it:

1. BSOD happens (blue screen of death, the geek code for a crash)
   
   
2. You made changes to the configuration (Control Panel settings)
   
   
3. You installed a new program
   
   
4. [Insert your own BSOD trigger]

In fact before XP, pretty much every little tweak you did in Windows needed the dreaded Restart -- changing as little as one digit in your IP address, adding a font, changing modem settings, sneezing in front of your monitor sometimes triggered a restart (okay I exaggerate, but you know how it was!)

At about this time, a little OS called Linux already existed and the same activities listed above never required a Restart! Windows tried hard to cover up this inconvenience until Linux users started boasting about total cost of ownership. All those Restarts where costing companies!

When we have no alternatives to a very difficult situation, we learn to live with what we have and forget that there could be a better way. I am ashamed to admit that I lived with this inconvenience.

But I'm happy because now that I use Mac, I have *never* had to restart just because I installed a new app, changed some setting, or on rare occasions, when an application went haywire and had to be Force Quitted (Windows theoretically could force-quit an erring application, but doing this almost always forced you to Restart, anyway. In Mac, I have so far never encountered this).

The only time I've had to restart was twice: both because downloaded a firmware update.
Now I just shake my head when I think of all the minutes I lost from waiting for Windows to Restart.