[school-discuss] FOSS WinXP FTP Software &c

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, thanks for the suggestions concerning
FTP software.  I'm probably going to give Filezilla a
try first, even though Firefox is the web browser that
I use the most; the web site for FireFTP listed the
currently available download version as a "beta," a
term which always brings out my more cautious side.
:-(

And why do I favor Firefox over Internet Explorer in
spite of IE's built-in click and drag FTP capacity
that Bill Barowy mentioned in his recent posting?

Well, here is another Microsoft horror story that you
FOSS evangelists can exploit. On my five-month-old
machine (2.6Ghz Celeron D, 512MB RAM, nice all-around
powerhouse), in spite of constant automatic updates to
all of the MS stuff, XP Pro & IE don't seem to get
along with each other very well. After I power up or
reboot, IE will work just fine for a while;
eventually, though, after hours or days (if I leave it
on that long  continuously), IE will stop loading web
sites and just hang there. I can, with some effort,
make IE finally shut down--Control-Alt-Delete, "The
program is not responding," multiple mouse clicks,
blah-blah-blah. When I could (which is not all the
time, of course), I've sent in the quasi-automatic
error reports to MS, for all the good *that* does. . .
.

Adding insult to injury, I've found that the IE crash
will sometimes leave me unable to run other apps that
normally work great. Rebooting fixes everything--but
only temporarily, of course.

Through all of this, Firefox has so far continued to
sail along just fine. Now I routinely go directly to
Firefox and avoid IE completely. My wife continues to
use IE out of habit; when it crashes on her, I switch
her over to Firefox. For 99% of her web activities,
she doesn't even notice the difference.

Why don't I scrap Windows completely and go pure
Linux? For the time being, at least, we need MS
compatibility with my wife's workplace for both our OS
and some apps. But this may not be true forever.

Enough for now.

Joel


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