[Lt Major Burns]

it runs windows. end of story.

i also moonlight in a bar at weekends, and we got new till registers to replace the archaic 10 year old systems we had before.

i saw the boxes they came in the week before they were installed. they said on the side "Built using Windows XP Technology"

"oh for F*cks Sake..."

i thought, perhaps they aren't that bad, i mean it's not as if they'll be running windows xp with IE and the start button or anything...

4 weeks on, and i have never seen so many fundamentally bad problems occurring with them.

for example, if you have more than 2 tills functioning and switched on (i.e. when it's busy, at a weekend), then they all start hanging for random periods of up to 5 minutes. it takes longer than that to reboot, so we have to wait there.

one till wouldn't let us change the pricing back from the "new" prices *it* decided. tech support didn't know how to fix that, but it fixed itself randomly a week later.

the main till that they are all networked to decided to crash badly. we havent been able to get a proper set of takings figures at all for about a week now.

one till likes to reboot itself randomly. this is inexplicable, and as mentioned before, they have a rough 10 minute boot cycle.

they are without a doubt the worst system i have ever had to come into contact with. i'd laugh but it makes my job harder. the old system *worked*, and it was much simpler to use as well, but still manged to do everything we do now. in fact there things we can't do now, like get itemised takings etc...

i bloody hate XP technology. they are the the flakiest, shoddy, most fragile computers i've ever seen.