Uncreative Labs

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 10:02 pm

I recall that four and five years ago, there was quite a bit of negative sentiment expressed here about Windows XP and the performance-, usability- and/or compatibility-related frustrations people had with it.

Thinking about that made me wonder: Out of everyone who swore to avoid using Windows XP back when it was new, who is still succeeding? Wink

I still use Windows 95 myself, so I guess I qualify.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I definatley qualify, heck, I did not even start using 2000 as my main Windows O/S till a few months ago. I pretty much have a philosophy that if I can figure out a way to get it to run on anything 32 bit or higher (386 SX or higher), then I've gotten good enough at it to move on to the next, and usually by then, it's a lot better.

I still don't like XP, for it seems more a "consumer" O/S than a workhorse O/S. The only versions that lack that unprofessional XP-like color scheme are the corporate versions, and even then I think it's hidden somewhere.

I think it all goes down to how tired I am of bloated software and operating systems. A great deal of the bloat are those silly little icons and images and fancy shaded crap put everywhere to make your GUI look like some uber-fantasy place. Me, I still use a basic color scheme and tiled backgrounds ala. Windows 3.1 all these 5 years later. While that stuff is fun, it eats up CPU time the more you use.

Case in point, I run a 1.0 GHz "Coppermine" Pentium III with 512MB of RAM with Windows 2000 Professional (that cool one stuck in the GEM AT chassis), that computer boots faster and runs better than most of the corporate Pentium 4 1.8-2.8 GHz machiines with 512-1GB of RAM and the same exact hard disk that I work on, all because of the way the desktop is configured on those Pentium 4 machines. It's pretty sad when a 2001 level computer with a Server board can open up a Can of whoppass on a 2004-2006 level Pentium 4 machine running the same exact Operating System.

Even then, my "new" (but actually VERY old) IBM Thinkpad 755CD runs my old copy of Windows 98SE under it's crippled (486 bus, Pentium Core) 75 Mhz CPU and 40 MB of RAM, and It runs great, only a minute or less to load.

I'm holding out on Vista unless I get to the point that I can afford a computer to build for it to learn it for "professional reasons". That's the crux of my profession, I work best with ancient software, am damn good at ALL hardware, but man oh man, everybody wants to run the latest thing, and it sucks that I have to sometimes hunt around and wait awhile before I can get the right PC and right O/S together to learn it and move on.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I upgraded to 98se about 2yrs ago and cannot run XP due to major software conflicts. I have XP on machines that I sell off but don't use it otherwise for my own use, ditto on 2k.

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 5:16 am

My whole family is running XP. The "Fisher Price" color scheme can be turned off, as well as the themes service that runs it. That's always one of the first things I do.

(On a side note, I'm back at school. Welcome to the ergonomic nightmare.)

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Gave up Win98 when my new machine got corrupted by tinkering with too many Linux Live CD's back in May. Blew the entire partition away and went with XP-Pro. Got DSL back in June. Haven't touched a Linux CD since (sad to say).....

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

i still run 98 se as I own 3 legal copies.
I have played around with me,2000, and xp
my d-i-l and son own a compaq with a pre-installed copy of xp home.
it died, aside from buying a new program / os there was no way to restore with the supplied cd. she has crashed several times, as frequently as 98se.

besides that there are error / warning messages from uncle billy.
but compaq and microsoft do not have a solution for a system and OS
that they own. 98se does not have this problem. you own or posess the original cd and that's it!

there are some hardware issues both ways. all our stuff works and a scanned might not with xp, unless we buy a new scanner.
our pc's may need to be upgraded, we max out at a p500 and the mb are limited to 384m, according to the manufacturer.

I went from DOS to windows, with a detour ( wordperfect 6.0 / dos )
allowed wysuwyg, my only reason for windows. needed better than a 286.
this was in the early 1990's
In 1995 we went on the internet and some kind of windows was required, first wfwg then 95.

we have been told that 98se will not do high speed internet.
too bad, like the bumblebee we can and do.
I have not gone to a full network as yet and will not listen to the nay sayers either.

Joined: 03 Oct 2004 Posts: 24 Location: Finland

I switched to mac, so OS X it is for me

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 22 Location: near myself

I use only XP from 2004 (before win 98 + XP home). In fact i usually run compilers and soho programs and XP works fine. I'm a little bit worried about Vista (i guess i should change my computer! Damn progress how much it costs Smile

).

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

Well, I got a try at the Vista beta, and let's just say this looks promising. It seems it ran brilliantly on my lil' PIII 1G with a now upgraded 80G hard drive and 512MB of RAM. So I mght give it a thought to upgrade, and yes, this was with the Aero interface. So I guess I might buy it when it comes down in price when it comes out.....

As for XP, I'll admit that some of my bitterness towards it is not the O/S itself, but of some of the people I dealt with early on who were constantly pushing it onto me to FORCE me to upgrade my computer when I so obviously could not afford it (were' talking a 19 year old jobless with a 486 DX here). Let's just say I'm rather weary of some computer techie types. People used to tout that XP was like some sort of remedy for everything computerized that could go wrong. Modem won't dial? Get XP! Hard Disk as a few bad sectors, GET XP! 486 won't run Duke Nukem 3-D, trash the 486, get a brand new HP with XP and play Everquest! It's just plain silly, no Windows or Linux or BSD or Unix or even CP/M is going to solve everyone's problems with their computer.

I run 2000 right now, only because 98 SE seems to be unstable on post 600 Mhz hardware. It ran like a jackrabbit on that ol' PIII 667 Mhz CPU I was running before, but once I put the 1G in there with a new cooler and upgraded cooling, it because a little too responsive, where divide by 0 became a common problem. It was pretty funny to see me try and deliberatly weight the computer down to make 98 continue to work. 2000's okay, but I'm missing not having to use DOSBox for some things (like Ultima 6).

98 SE is still by far the best 9x Windows ever made in my opinion. It has a rather wide swath of compatability (386 DX-40 on up to a Pentium III 1GHz, now THATS a stretch), all the installations I've had it's been pretty hard to crash, even forcing a 486 to push Direct X 7 3-D screensavers, and play Real Audio on RealPlayer G2. Heck, that thing'd run Diablo, at full frame rate nonetheless! And in the manual Diablo specifically says not to use anything slower than a Pentium 1.

95 was overhyped crap. I think they should have just held it in till 98 SE and just put out a new Shell for 3.1 that was not bug ridden if "new" was so important. Every computer I've had OSR1 or OSR2 on has crashed the Windows Explorer when I went to do some file management for awhile. However, it's great for gaming as long as interaction with the O/S is minimal.

Windows 3.1x to me is by far my favorite. It's like linux for newbs without the *nix part. INI files, SYS files, ,manual configurations, a whole encyclopedia for fun things to increase thje power, performance and productivity from over the years, and it's still rather usable if I could just give up 3-D gaming and Youtube.

Any windows lower has been a waste of time, if it can't run at least 3.1x here, I just put DOS on it and be happy.

As far as blowing partitions up for Linux, I can sympathise, I just went through that crap upgrading my hard disk, almost 2 hours to put Fedora Core 5 on, just to find Udev acting up, and then I realized I had a BIOS setting wrong, and that's why my hard disk was acting like the MBR was messed up without a CD in the drive. I remember tying to use Open BSD 3.4 for the first time, I swear I must have done a R&R (Reformat & Reinstall) of Windows about 6 times that night before I finally gave up. fun fun

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

I run xp pro on almost all my systems. I still have an athlon xp running linux as well as a handfull of 95/98 systems but they rarely see use.

Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:30 pm

I'm still resisting XP. Have been using W2K for about the past 4 years. I've tried XP and only found an OS that slows my computer down a bit more, and loads more junk that I have to disable.

W98SE would start becoming flakey about year or so after installation, W2K can go a lot longer.

I've been converting a lot of my VHS videos to DVD and use the computer for that task, the 4GB file size limitation of W9x would make the process a lot harder.

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:10 am

Quote:

I've been converting a lot of my VHS videos to DVD and use the computer for that task, the 4GB file size limitation of W9x would make the process a lot harder.

Especially if you have a cheap capture card that only AVI capture through VirtualDub is reliable! I've got a 250 gig drive just for the initial capture!

Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2006 8:51 pm

Puckdropper, I use an AVI capture card (Philips SAA7134 chip) and the avi files are about 25-30gig per hour of captured material, and that is using a lossless codec which gives mild compression (about 2x). Completely uncompressed avi runs about 60 gig per hour!

I then use software to convert the avi files to mpeg files (m2v and ac3), and then author them to DVD format.

Before the signal reaches the capture card, it first goes through a time base corrector; and then a hardware video processor (Elite BVP-4 plus) for color and luminance adjustments!

My VCR is a JVC 9911 S-VHS model.

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

I use Windows XP on anything that will support it. I think it's great Smile

Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 4:56 am

Sounds like you've got a lot better setup than I. I've got a basic VCP (Not even stereo, but for $3 I'm not complaining.) and a cheap capture card that gives acceptable results. If I use anything but VirtualDub to capture, the audio/video sync produces noticable differences after just 10 minutes.

With a better card, supposedly you can capture straight to MPEG. That'd be great for what I do, I could even record live TV!