My OS is...

[ChrisX]

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]

@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! :P

[zodiac]

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

[Sefy]

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

[EddyH]

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

[Quigonsean]

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


Actually Win2K Pro Sp3 all the way baby

Sean

[racer-x]

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.

[ChrisX]

Must say Win98SE seems about the best for me so far.

Even though, my primary OS is Win2000 and I still use the good ol' Win98 on an old IBM computer.

The OS is pretty good and don't have a problem with it now since the hard drive was re-formatted and Win98 and all the programs re-installed.

It now works as a charm and a lot better since the clean up of the hard drive with the mess of unused files and the registry clogged up with old entries.

WinME was a disaster in another computer, a horrible OS with all those errors, crashes, re-starts and bugs and this computer is now Win2000. No more problems now.

I think I am for Win2000 SP3 and then Win98 is the 2nd best OS.

[Craig Tucker]

@Craig Tucker, when the day comes and the software that "I" need will not
run on Windows98SE, it will be the day that i will simply stop using any kind
of Microsoft Product.

Just bought myself a Sony Ericsson P800 phone (very nice by the way). The sync software that comes with this does not support 98 either. I think we are likely to see this more and more.

[Sefy]

@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 :P

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!).

[musher70]

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

[SLICK RICK]

WinXP

[Cyrl]

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*

[WeedVender]

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]

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]

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..

[Sefy]

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.

[LanEvo7]

Win2k and in a small partition w98se just for "those" times
I'don't like WinXP, so when w2k support gonna turn limited, my next move gonna be Mac or Linux

Sorry, Linux was bought by Microsoft.

I use Windows XP, its alrite. Everything that I need runs on it. Crashes less than Win ME and Win 98. Everything pretty much works for it now since its been out so long.

Macs are not in anyway cheaper than PCs. There are PCs under $500 that are good enough to do basic uses. Besides all macs have is look.

[puertorican138]

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

[NightWing]

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]

Macs are not in anyway cheaper than PCs. There are PCs under $500 that are good enough to do basic uses. Besides all macs have is look.

It sounds like M$ has already gotten to you. Yet again Big Brother ruins a person's mind. Quick question, when was the last time you really used a Mac?

[Sefy]

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.

[tgpo]

Sure Sefy, there are tons of games available for the mac. Tony Hawk, Quake, Unreal, ALice, Sim City, The Sims, Warcraft, Starcraft....etc

[Sefy]

That's not even 10% of the list of games for the PC
What about all the latest top hit games today ? you got any counterpart for
the Mac ?

[tgpo]

That's not even 10% of the games for the mac, just the ones off the top of my head. What are the top 10 PC games?

[LanEvo7]

It sounds like M$ has already gotten to you. Yet again Big Brother ruins a person's mind. Quick question, when was the last time you really used a Mac?

I'm sorry if you thought I meant windows is better than mac OS. I am talking about hardware-wise. You can compare the hardware that is compatible with PC and Mac. It is obvious that the PC has superior hardware. The processors are MUCH faster(almost double the speed, and no I am not talking MHZ wise). The best video card(Radeon 9800Pro) is out for the PC not MAC, and Nvidia didn't even bother releasing the FX for the Mac(yet). The best personal ide hard drive out on the market, WD Special Edition, doesn't work for the mac. Finally the apple got smarter and has started using DDR Ram for their desktops. So there you have it 3 out of the 4 most important components for a computer, the PC is superior.

For graphics editing, Macs were faster in the past, but now they aren't. If you don't believe me you can look at benchmarks that are all over the internet.

For games, yes most of the top 10 games that are out for pc, probably are out for the mac. But so what, the graphics LOOK better and the game runs smoother on a PC because of its faster processors and the better video cards.

The last time I used a mac was about three days ago in school. All I used it for was surfing the net, and I don't think a PC would have done the job better. So yea, for basic surfing and stuff, they are both equal. Then again, if I wanted to just surf the net, a pc is much cheaper.

[Coop]

Win 2k SP2

The more I use 2k, the less I can stand the instability of Me, 98, 95. During the 4 years I ran 98, I think I reinstalled it on average once every six months or so. Win 2k isn't perfect, but I no longer have to keep rebooting my machine, no more BSOD, no more app crashes, and things are MUCH more stable.

[EddyH]

O/S2 Warp is still contemporary? Like some kind of underground Linux competitor now or something? Or just for the retro factor..
Learn something new every day.

I don't get what causes 98 to need reinstallation all the time, unless there's some critically damaging thing that other people do that I don't, and both I and they are missing it... a decent custom and later tweaked installation, conservativism in installing programs that affect the system rather than running inside of it, and use of some simple utils like virus blockers, firewall, crashguard, a memory recoverer, tweakUI and improved scan/defrag programs, keep it running at about a flat level of reliability which is good enough. You know. All the stuff that really should be included with windows rather than all the flash non-computer-person-attracting extras
I'm satisfied with the stability, though it could be better. It's not as if I've realisitically owned a computer that was ever that much better. Hell, the atari was only 8mhz, but still tended to overheat if you tried to leave it on continuously.. mostly because of the fanless PSU! (discounting the crashes too; less often than 98, but it had zero tolerance to them. if the computer "Bombed" for some reason , and it usually found some way to do it daily, then that was it, you were screwed)

Speaking of which....


Nightwing.. fraid I never heard of STart and most those things you said about (except maybe Tempus in passing).. was an STFormat (and occasionally STAction/STUser) child all the way. Guess even within the more limited (OR WAS IT?!) spread of 16bit software there was room for entirely different sets of apps.
I didnt have Megamaze, but I *did* have Midi-maze if thats what you meant. So would have liked to ever find another 15 atari users with copies of it and get down to some (incredibly limited - floating smiley faces with pop-guns in untextured wolfenstein type environments ) Doom-LAN style 2.5D team/deathmatch shooting (from 1986! ) but only ever once managed to hookup, with one other machine rats!

Was just getting into real serious use of the machine above and beyond gaming, the odd dabble in BASIC and paint, and showing off by printing stuff as plain ASCII (using the old dotmatrix printer's built-in NLQ fonts) for school reports instead of writing them, when the PC happened along and made it a bit of a moot point; windows write and ms paint could beat many of the apps i'd been using til that point . (Conversely i still havent found even remote replacements for others)

Some plays with spreadsheets, CAD, wysiwyg text (both bitmap and vector) and so on, mostly from magazine coverdiscs with somewhat outdated "full versions", and even some raytracing (25 hours to make that classic pacman pic at a disc-busting, totally undisplayable 560x420 rez), a full on record catalogue, and especially tons of super-blocky DTP with Printmaster. Your family doesn't know what love is until you've made them birthday cards with monochrome bitmap icon clipart at about 60dpi, or your teacher what crappy ass computing is til you make a project half using that level of quality, and half write/paint on a borrowed 386 laptop. (Magic - 3.6mb, hi rez display with greyscales, 100mb hard disk.. though somewhat slower than the atari!).

Some various atari <--> PC experiments for a while (importing photos from Encarta95 into old programs.. returning the favour by making models rendered in 1987 CAD3D into future-retro windows wallpaper), but eventually, the 486 won.

The ST now sits next to the TV, waiting for me to eBay a new keyboard circuit board so that it can be run controllably for more than 20 minutes at a time with any program besides Dynablaster and Gauntlet II... The best that I realistically want to do with it is see just how good (or bad) Elite 2: Frontier looks on it next to a 486 with the same; Pop a copy of Tempus or Calamus into it and print some vector text and clipart stuff off with a borrowed HP500, as it was always too expensive to do so at the time; see if any of those system routine replacement utilities really do the job of bringing the windows/menus up those critical few percents from 'almost intolerably slow' to 'easily quick enough'; then play a few rounds of International Karate Plus for old times sake... still got the music as an MP3, how sad is that.

Oh yeah... and if it can be got working... some guy keeps trying to sell me a copy of Videomaster and the big ol' capture cartridge over email... just how retro would it be to capture some vids with that and find some way to convert them to MPG. Generating the original video source using a PXLVision audio-cassette camera for the full on faux cooler-than-death underground experience.

[Sefy]

@EddyH, Oh yes! OS/2 Warp is very much alive! and gets more support and
updates then both 2000 and XP put together!, considering it's dated from the
age of Windows NT4 which has no support for AGP features or USB or other
advanced PC features, OS/2 DOES support nearly all of them!

It also has a new name and new look, now it's called eComStation, but like it
always was, it's not designed for games, and that's why it's not as popular as
Windows, but because of the strong development going on it, it's possible to
run Office2000 on OS/2, and many other Windows 32bit applications straight
on OS/2 as if they were native applications.

[EddyH]

Hey hey! It's rant time again.

Sefy.... now that's the kind of coolness that I like to see as regards OSs and communities etc.
MS's relentless push onwards in hunt of bigger and better (profits) is a little dangerous to my mind, maybe on the way to creating somewhat of a reverse y2k phenom or something.. or like ever bigger shiny brand-new SUVs without fully exploring what can be done with a 1993 Subaru Forester that's just finished being properly run in

Like I harped on about above - the first "real" computer I had (outside of a borrowed sinclair spectrum that taught me BASIC.. when i was about 4..) was bought when it was twice the age this one is now, and it hadnt even reached it's prime.. the operating system dated essentially to a little before the first apple mac, but programs and new devices/adaptors were still being made to work - with even the very earliest versions - well into the 90s and nothing seemed too wrong with that. Even a slowing trickle of versions of the latest & greatest games; even a pretty damn good Wolfenstein rival appeared, though Doom and their ilk then came and marked the end for any non-PC or non-32bit+ console games platforms. Greatest cross compatibility using the same base code makes for a pretty large market for not *too* much effort, and all the bugs, speedup tricks, etc, get to be discovered and very well known. (though it helped that the OS didnt get a truly major version-number upgrade for a very long time, only incremental versions equivalent to windows service packs; and even then, despite deep rooted differences the major numbered versions continued to be essentially compatible just with some different core components)
I never cease to be amazed some of the things that were seen to be used inside of what ended up being deeply 'legacy' hard & firmware, simply because some hack took the time and care to code or build it. I know some nutter who's got one hooked up to an 8gb hard disk (there surely cant be that much stuff available for a predominantly floppy disc machine?) and a DVDROM drive (why?!?!) through a fairly standard ASCI-to-SCSI port adaptor with "regular" drivers. Wouldn't be at all surprised if USB adaptors and drivers are available somewhere, and they work just as well as anything in windows.

Being unable to handle FAT32 in the original release is understandable enough as that's a core component, the main file system that's at the heart of the whole OS (still, such things are upgradable with effort - see Win32s). However, I mean, just what was with the "no USB or DVD support" in Win95... that's smells deeply of cow droppings to me... surely if you write the interface driver, you can add any connectable hardware to any system?! One of those things requires plugging in via the PCI / PCMCIA bus, either on a card or built in, the other is vanilla ATAPI. Can't see the connection problem there. If 3.1 and 9x can handle a 100% proprietary ISA card that backs up data to a videocassette, just from drivers installed off a DSDD floppy... if all that was required in MSDOS to add CD support to a non-CD operating system was a .SYS CD interface driver and the MSCDEX TSR program to utilise it.... then what's this bullshit about 95 not being able to use those interfaces?
Grrrr. They'll make up something that 98 arbitarily can't grok next (USB 3.0? Firewire 2? Some new expansion socket?) as an upgrade poke..



Windows 98 is, what, barely 5 years old now, it should just be getting into it's prime (as win3.1 was, when 95 was *released* to muted sales, rather than established like XP is... and as are ME, 2000) as regards all the known bugs, fixes, improvements and all, yet it's considered deeply old hat because of the several rushed out in-between versions.

Raaaagh. Depressing. Let's start a pool on how soon the successor to XP is dashed out and bombards the shelves and mail-order pages, resulting in the wipeout of 98 and ME, perfectly good and still extremely servicable systems thrown on the scrapheap, and the forced semi-obsolescence of still-fresh 2000 (what, 2.5 years at best), and barely out of beta XP..