My OS is...

ChrisX · Posted: Feb 25, 2003 17:24

Windows 2000 Pro for me.

I agree with Sefy that Windows OS's are generally too expensive with Microsoft's restrictive marketing practices. Very expensive as Microsoft expects me to purchase a separate CD installation disc for each computer on the same OS.

It is a ridiculous extra revenue for Microsoft and one copy is enough for someone owning a network of computers. I am paying too much.

WinXP is too expensive for me and it is time for Microsoft to reduce prices and this includes Office applications as well.

Sefy · Guardian Angel Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Location: Israel

@tgpo, I completly disagree with you regarding "everything works on it"
I want to see you running all the latest PC games, I want to see you running
all the latest PC based stuff on your Mac.

Don't get me wrong, Mac for Graphics beats the PC hands down, you won't
get an argument from me on that one! but for the AVERAGE user of the PC,
who usually plays games, he can put the Mac as a fancy paper holder!

_________________
Email me for faster replies!

Best Regards,
Sefy Levy,
Certified Computer Technician.

zodiac · Member Joined: 30 Sep 2002

speaking of games on the mac,check this commercial out :hahaha:
http://www.neds.ca/files/apple_gamer.wmv
_________________

Sefy · Guardian Angel Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Location: Israel

Oh you cracked me up! oh that's a killer!!!

_________________
Email me for faster replies!

Best Regards,
Sefy Levy,
Certified Computer Technician.

EddyH · Posted: Apr 05, 2003 18:34

Must say Win98SE seems about the best for me so far. May have to change that opinion dependent on whether I can get it to recognise more than 128gb of my 180gb disc after I put the new ultra-ATA card in to help the mobo along... if I gets the extra ~50gb then it still wins. If not then an U/G to 2000, or, heaven forfend, XP may be in the works.

Or I may just jump ship to Linux. The vast majority of the storage will be dedicated to media, so if fairly direct equivalents to the programs I use can be found (WIMP shell, office suite comprising WP/SS/DB/DTP, internet & mail, photo/paint, some fairly specialised sound and video convertors, CD burning, palm synch, and a few simple games pretty much covers it - oh yeah and drivers for video/audio/camera/printer/scanner) and the installation isn't too challenging... hell why not.

98SE just has that nice balance between all the essential functionality without all the straight-out bloat, screwups, and wierdness that seem to have been introduced in ME and beyond. It's got LFN, fairly easy networking, FAT32 (yeah, 'yuck's all round from the hardcore but it does the job), USB, support for a few softwares 95 doesn't like, and hopefully Big Drives compatibility... Sure it hasn't totally escaped the bloat itself, but I have no doubts at all that it could be easily installed on my old thinkpad and run usably with Office 2000. And it's a 75mhz 486, with 24mb RAM, a slow 500mb drive, and a VGA-rez 32k colour display.
Mind you I've also heard that XP will happily live inside of pretty much any Pentium so long as you feed it a big bag of RAM and a gigabyte disc, disable hardware capability checking on install, and spend a half day wading through UI treacle to disable all the fancy stuff back down to a 98-esque level!

Does anyone know of any software yet out that works only with ME and/or XP and no earlier versions? I don't think I've seen anything that's too 'new' for Win98 yet. Even OfficeXP has been seen working on the college intranet w98 machines.

But.... hell. I'd still be using WfWG 3.11 all the way (both the laptops still have it

) if only I could figure out the myriad instructions for adding LFN, FAT32 and USB utilities and bigger stacks (unless W32s did that of course), getting hold of compatible drivers for my hardware, doing the voodoo required to connect to a 32-bit windows network, properly installing that win95 / X-win -a-like shell "Calmira" (which runs inside of about 500k!).... the y2k bug is actually fairly easy to squish in 3.1!
And so on.

Of course - that's the problem of 3.1 and the key in 98... it may seem more advanced and all but it's just so much easier to do any number of things in 98, without so much of the oversimplification in the newest ones. 98's defrag still blows though; Norton Speeddisk is better, more like the old DOS optionfest.
(heck... i wonder how usable even DOS would be... in my very early homebuilding days, when the family machine was about a 266MMX, i modded up a 286 someone gave me with spare parts. win3.1 and works would function, but none too fast.. however Lotus Symphony was the bomb, a lot like works, if only i could have got a later version without some of the wysiwyg bugs.. and all the other DOS stuff ran like a charm on it. actually seemed quite fast, at all of 12 intel/MS mhz)

To go even further, in a perfect world I would never have had to abandon Atari TOS v1.0... yeah... got the very first original old ROM version of that GEM-based OS in my old 1-meg ST. Didn't even have Blitter support, the half decent fileselector or any number of minor enhancements in my friend's 1/2mb STFM (tos 1.04! oh the glamour!).

Very strange, how we bought those 8mhz machines (8 *motorola* mhz without MS tax though - so functionally as quick as a 386SX/16), with no hard disks, less memory than a HD floppy, and a maximum screen mode inferior to mono-VGA, as second users when they were already 5 or 6 years old, yet they were still pretty much contemporary with PCs costing thousands... took as long again until they were obsolete enough for a move up to mid-mhz 486s to be anything like "worth it". 10-12 years time from original purchase to functional obsolescence (and with patience, I could probably still do most - though not all - of the non-AV-media based activities this PC gets put to..). Mr Moore would be shocked. This Duron 850 has barely cracked 18 months and already it's far outpaced by even the cheapest of "now" systems. Very strange, very very strange.

How very strange also that migration from 1984/5-vintage TOS to win3.1 was fairly easy, but it would have been even easier going from a version around TOS 2.06 to Win98... shockingly similar outside of the hardware support and Start-button

_________________
-= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!

Quigonsean · Member Joined: 12 Mar 2003

I don't know what to call my OS since I run a Commodore64

Actually Win2K Pro Sp3 all the way baby

Sean
_________________
We all like Sheep have gone astray...

racer-x · Posted: Apr 05, 2003 19:25

Why choose? Just multi-boot. Sometimes I feel like Win98se and sometimes I feel like XP pro. They both have there strenghts and weeknesses. That's the beuty of democricy. You really can have your cake and eat it too.
_________________
Never argue with an idiot.......he'll only bring you down to his level and beat you with experience.

ChrisX · Posted: Apr 05, 2003 19:38

Craig Tucker · Moderator Joined: 05 Apr 2001 Location: England

Sefy · Guardian Angel Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Location: Israel

@Craig, since as you propably know from other posts, i'm a big hate "fan" of
Sony products, I couldn't care less they will migrate to XP only! the whole of
the planet can switch to Sony, and i'll stick with my counterparts

And like I said, when the software "I" need stop working on 98SE, then i'll be
saying goodbye all together for the last Microshaft product I have on my PC,
and i'll do the finaly move to OS/2 Warp (or eComStation if I get my hands
on that system!).
_________________
Email me for faster replies!

Best Regards,
Sefy Levy,
Certified Computer Technician.

musher70 · Member Joined: 19 Jun 2002

YOU FORGOT "OTHER", like other microsoft
"un-official" OS like "Longhorn" and "Whistler"

SLICK RICK · Posted: Apr 06, 2003 10:39

WinXP

Cyrl · Member Joined: 29 Apr 2002

I have XP Pro, I've never had any problems with it and compatability, it is quite stable.. if something crashes I can continue doing whatever wtihout worries... I didn't see anywhere that lists system uptime but my Network connection seems to keep a timer of how long it's been active, I know the system has been up longer as sometimes I disable my internet connection temporarily etc...

looks stable to me *shrug*
_________________
We will either find a way or make one - Hannibal

WeedVender · Posted: Apr 06, 2003 10:55

Quad Boot...

Primary- WinME (i know it sucks)
Secondary- Red Hat Linux (looks nice, dunno what to do with it)
Third- Win2k PRo (good for encoding)
Quad- WinXp Pro (just sits there)

ckdexterhn1 · Member Joined: 18 Feb 2003

I love Windows 2000. Very stable, and all of my Windows 98 apps still work on 2000. Heard they are many drivers still won't work in XP.

EddyH · Posted: Apr 06, 2003 19:49

I think when stuff stops working on 98, I shall do one of four things:

1. Take that S%&!! back to the shop and DEMAND a replacement and not leave till they agree.
2. Move, grudgingly, up to XP (or hopefully: whatever the actually-superior successor is!)
3. Go to Linux. Or perhaps dual boot to a minimal version of it, specifically to work that one item, which undoubtably some open source hacker will have provided support for on this 'underground' OS even if the makers couldnt be bothered to throw a couple thousand credits at including rudimentary 9x support. (My epson printer still has 3.1 drivers on the CD even though it's a USB model. Very odd. That's the one thing I like Epson for

)
4. Learn to program C++ or at least VB for myself... why bitch about a lack of support when you can provide it yourself!

MS dropped 16-bit windows (3.1 and old NT) support effective Jan 1st this year. Very sad that they actually took the effort to remove the affected webpages and links to them from their site (wow all of a hundred megs space and a few hundred kays of traffic a day saved, surely) rather than just leaving them there for the old guard to refer to. Probably ripped the pages out of the support manual instead. So now if you ever have a win3.1 problem (say, you're trying to get networking figured out on an old laptop that has an ethernet card but no floppy, so you can install some useful software or OS) you have to go to places like www.computing.net instead.

The bonus upshot of this is that they don't seem to care if you pirate old windows/DOS and compatible versions of office/works/publisher/etc anymore

It's slowly getting easier to put hands on them after a long dry spell hunting for floppies.

Tho... looking at Cryl's testimony... I don't worry too much about carrying on with other programs after stuff crashes, the occasional "hard" lockup does occur but not that often. General procedure is to kill or unfreeze the affected app and fly by the seat of your pants for a while in everything else. Usually it hangs together but sometimes you can just 'smell' that its time you did the rounds of Alt-Tab Ctrl-S Alt-F4 and reboot

A 2-3 day max uptime is a fact of life. 5+ days even with individual crashes, now i'm interested. Even after the headache that was helping a family friend (another former committed DOS-3.1-9x'er) figure out how to do previously simple things in XP. Not MS's most intuitive system yet if it's the first time it's required the two of us to put our heads together rather than picking it up as if it's natural..

What's the system overhead like though? After upgrading, I'm starting to get used to the swapfile meter saying my 500-mb virtual memory is 100% EMPTY... and the UI rarely (but not never) suffering slowdown and lag. Wouldnt like to see that change.

As my dad once said to me... hey, there used to be a time people would upgrade their software or operating system simply because it would make the computer run faster or provide more free memory (still happens with PalmOS

).. nowadays people buy hardware to do that because it's inevitable each new version will slow up the machine and eat RAM..
_________________
-= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!

Sefy · Guardian Angel Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Location: Israel

I Already have Tripple Boot on my PC using:
1. OS/2 Warp v4.51
2. Mandrake Linux 9
3. Windows98 Second Edition

So i'm already preparing the switching to other OS's, there aren't too many
programs that I don't already have a counterpart on other OS's, so it will be
rather easy to do the switch.
_________________
Email me for faster replies!

Best Regards,
Sefy Levy,
Certified Computer Technician.

LanEvo7 · Member Joined: 19 Dec 2002

puertorican138 · Posted: Apr 06, 2003 20:25

My OS's are Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows XP.

NightWing · Member Joined: 19 Mar 2001

Hi EddyH

I agree on the TOS OS! I shock a lot of people running PC from that same time on the speed and ease. Had the best editor of text Tempus. Did you ever run the game from STart that was a small square battle game? And also Megamaze?

The main system runs W2k and by slider trays can run various OS like W98SE and Linux.

The video computer runs W98SE. Due to drivers issue and I want somthing I can remove unused parts to bring up the speed.

tgpo · No Longer Mod Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Location: The South Side

Sefy · Guardian Angel Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Location: Israel

tgpo, as a big hater of M$ as I am, do you honestly believe a Mac can be of a
use to any gamer ?

The only thing it's good for is Graphics Design, other then that, I don't really
see a use for a Mac for the Average User and Gamer.

_________________
Email me for faster replies!

Best Regards,
Sefy Levy,
Certified Computer Technician.

tgpo · No Longer Mod Joined: 15 Feb 2002 Location: The South Side

Sure Sefy, there are tons of games available for the mac. Tony Hawk, Quake, Unreal, ALice, Sim City, The Sims, Warcraft, Starcraft....etc
_________________
http://www.tgpo.org
Will Hay is my son