>> When I was managing those Macs we were still on the last iteration of MacOS 8
>> and the Macs used to "decay" at a very similar rate to the PCs running Win95 and WinNT4.

>I never had that kind of problem myself, but then I ran a very streamlined system
>and didn't run too many extentions. A print bureau I used to work at would
>reinstall their systems every six months or so, but stuck rigidly to 7.5.3
> which was probably one of the most crash-prone releases ever. I finally
>encouraged them to upgrade to OS 8.1 and they found the systems much
>faster and far more stable.

That would be the difference then, I had 250 or so users with a fairly free hand to do whatever they liked with the systems.

>Did you run Norton Utilities or similar on the systems by any chance? I
> found that caused more problems that it fixed and if useless utilities
> such as filesaver were enabled, the system would get slower over time.

I had much the same experience as you. About the only thing we used Norton for in the end was recovering deleted files. For about 18 months we did make extensive use of RamDoubler, until Apple built something similar into the OS. Without RamDoubler running MS Office on most of our machines was pretty much a non-starter.

They have pretty much switched over to PCs now, as the primary reason for having computers on their desks was to run MS Office.

You couldn't pay me enough to got back and manage that network of MacOS 8.x Macs again, about the only good thing that came out of it was that between Alan Cox and myself the AppleTalk routing in the Linux kernel got fixed so that it worked when there were two Linux boxes between you an a remote Mac.

I always used to spend half of Sunday mornings tracking down all the Macs that had locked up when Retrospect had kicked off on Saturday to back them up remotely (we had no big servers so almost all data was stored on people's desktops)...

>> We brings me to MacOS X, which although I haven't used it, I am sure it suffers
>> from few of these problems. I also hear that it's config data is in plain text file
>> (or XML at least) ?

>All the Apple stuff is in XML (they inculde an editor in the dev tools too), the BSD
>stuff is usually plain text.

Are third party developers sticking to the same approach ?