Whoops, your comments wound up in my spam queue! Sorry for the obscene delay.

What’s exceptionally clear to me is that you know probably more about Windows than I ever will, and you assume that my mistakes are malicious attempts to mislead rather than inexperience. This is not the case; I assure you, my ignorance regarding Windows is far greater than my knowledge.

You’re right that I know the difference between a BIOS and an OS, and you’re also right that Windows had nothing to do with the workings of messed-up BIOS settings. I apologize for this mistake. What I should have been referring to instead is the PC ecosystem made of of 3rd party hardware+BIOS+Windows, as opposed to the Mac ecosystem in which everything comes from Apple. It’s my view that this pieced-together system, while it has its advantages (hardware freedom, wide variety of choice), caused the problem due the inherent incompatibilities in components that weren’t necessarily designed to be used in tandem.

For the floppy problem, the user in fact told me that she often booted the computer with a floppy in it with no issue, so I was assuming that the BIOS couldn’t change itself. Thus, I blamed Windows. Truth is, I was guessing. I had no idea what the precise problem was. My basic point was that a non-integrated system is prone to such seemingly random issues. I chose Windows as my whipping boy because it was easy, and I was mad. I didn’t know, and so I shouldn’t have assumed. I apologize.

Also, I was completely unaware of how often bad boot order-related problems were in the floppy era. I was basically talking out of my ass, and you were right to correct me. Thanks.

Same goes for WinRAR in the shell. I didn’t actually know that it wasn’t running at all times. But what about Daemon Tools? I’m a little more sure that I was right about that one, at least, since how could it be on-demand if it wasn’t constantly running?

See, I think the general problem here is that you seem to think I’m much more knowledgeable than I actually am. No problem on the negative tone; I apologize about the ranty post. Truth is, this post was borne out of a mad rage, and was therefore a good deal less reasonable and informed than it should have been, and for that I apologize.

“This was Windows we were talking about, after all”

“attempting to make Windows conform to logic was an exercise in futility”

“invoking the classic Windows user’s voodoo explanation for a problem with no obvious cause”

“this particular random Windows-related problem”

…And yet you freely admit that the problem was that the BIOS was set to boot off the floppy before the hard drive, which it couldn’t, because there wasn’t an operating system on the floppy. At no point was Windows involved at all, because the BIOS wasn’t trying to load an OS off the hard drive. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if the machine had a hacked copy of OS X on it rather than Windows.

You’re no computer newbie, you know the difference between the BIOS (/EFI) and the operating system; I think you’re perfectly aware of this. Why did you affect the pretense of not doing so? If you’re point is that Windows has problems, I’m sure you can find enough genuine problems that you don’t have to make up ones that have nothing to do with Windows.

BTW, the answer to “But in that case, wouldn’t this have been a routine occurrence back in the days of floppies when everybody used them for everything?” is yes. When booting off floppies was common, it was a regular occurence to get a “non-bootable disk or drive inserted” BIOS error if you’d left a floppy in the drive; in which case you just ejected the floppy and pressed any key. It’s less common now both because so few people use floppies and because BIOSes are now rarely set by default to boot off a floppy before a hard drive.

The rest of your post is riddled with several problems as well (e.g. explorer extensions such as those which Winrar uses don’t “steal valuable system resources” unless you count the negligible time it takes for the graphics card to draw the slight bigger right-click menu; the program isn’t run unless you actually use it). I do agree with you about the amount of crap that comes with a lot of drivers these days, though: I’ve come to usually just not install them; most of the time, they work just fine with Windows’ built-in drivers, and I imagine the same is true with Mac OS.

Sorry for the negative tone of this post; I’d just finished my rather long comment on your post about the registry above.