the latent pain of ms windows

speaking to a colleague the other day about his laptop backup strategy, i first volunteered my approach. i create a full image of my powerbook so that i can recover everything completely (and even bootup from the firewire drive). i do full backups weekly or just before traveling. i also do smaller backups of documents, mail, and such as "incrementals".

my colleague, an apt developer who uses windows os, had a very different strategy. he said he just backs up important files. when i asked him about how he would deal with a catastrophic failure, he said he'd just install all the applications. i was puzzled because this would surely take a long time, and he said that he would appreciate the "opportunity" of doing such a reinstall to get the computer in a cleaner state.

the latent pain here is that windows offers an incredible drag factor to its users. registries get corrupted, things start to break, and people who use these machines - even professional developers - grow increasingly tolerant of this type of thing. some wait for the opportunity to start with a clean computer, and this probably means buying a new one for those without the skills or wherewithall to reinstall everything(while enduring the old broken one for a hopefully short period).

i would wager that you could add six months of life to the average windows computer (the point when the user can't stand it any more) by formatting the drive and starting again (or Degunking, which Vista is addresssing). by comparison, people hang on to their macintoshes to the bitter end, complaining only that it seems slow, and giving in only because they finally *DO* need that piece of software that only runs on mac os x.

another true macintosh benefit: greater longevity with less latent pain.