Re: Microsoft making vendors remove drivers

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:32:08 -0700, JosephKK <quiettechblue@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Your experiences with various M$ OS products is very different than
mine.

I just fix computers. I don't use them.

That's actually fairly accurate. In the repair biz, I only see broken
computers. I'm sure that there are users and systems out there that
work the first time, are totally stable, and do all the right things.
It's just that I don't see any of these. What I see are the one's
that don't work.

That also applies to customers. You are apparently knowledgeable in
the art of keeping a computer alive. You wouldn't do something dumb,
like simultaneously install several virus scanners (a common practice
incidentally). You probably put some effort into keeping your
machines fairly well organized and free of junkware.

Well, that's not what I see. I get customers that are lacking in
either the time or patience to deal with such mundane tasks. That's
fine, as I will gladly separate them from their money and do it for
them. It's easy enough.

I found MSwin 3.1 to be a fine reasonably stable product. I
had it running for weeks nonstop.

I accidentally found something interesting about Windoze 3.1. While
doing battle with Windoze 95, the speed and memory capacity of the
motherboards had increased substantially. For fun, I setup Windoze
3.1 to run from a 16MByte RAM disk on a fast (for it's time) machine,
which I think was a Pentium 200MMX. Not only was it blindingly fast,
but it was amazingly stable. Something about the older 386/486
motherboards apparently was giving Windoze 3.1 a bad reputation. On
fast hardware, it worked just fine.

Another anecdote from the time was my customer from hell. I'll spare
you the details. She constantly complained that her Windoze 3.1
machine was crashing. My office machine was similar and totally
stable, so I just traded machines. I found no problems using her
machine in my office, but she continued to see stability problems with
my known good machine. I don't know what she was doing to cause
problem. Maybe her computer is situated over a tiny black hole that
sucks in bits. Dunno.

M$Win95 however i could not get to boot as often as not. Totally
flaky. Never got it to run more that a day or so at a crack

I didn't have much of a problem with the operating system. I was
about the same quality as Windoze 3.1 with the same issues. The
problems I had all revolved around newly minted applications and
ported Windoze 3.1 code. More often than not, the application would
crash the operating system, which sorta hints that the operating
system is not going a very good job of defending itself.

Did not use any NT though.

I did. NT3.5 and NT4.0. I just killed off a customers NT4 servers
(PII/450) that had been running continuously and reliably for perhaps
8 years. I never bothered using it for a desktop application, but 4.0
was just fine for a server.

MSWin98 was alright though. I still have running on older machines
that will not run XP.

Methinks Win98SE (second edition) was the best of the bunch. When W2K
came out, MS tried to stop Win98SE development. That didn't work
because W2K wasn't really ready, so they rushed out WinME as an
interim solution. Incidentally, the timing is why it's impossible to
do an in-place upgrade from WinME to W2K. Anyway, WinME was a patch
job of bug fixes, half implemented features, and new bugs. I managed
to get it stable by disabling many of the half implemented features
(i.e. system restore) that were causing problems. It's ok, but
methinks Win98SE is slightly better.

Moved to XP for my first dual CPU unit. I liked the faster boot
times.

It won't last. Ever notice that XP takes more and more time to boot
as it gets older? I've been forced into doing some rather painful
reinstalls from scratch (usually on a new hard disk) to recover. None
of the speed improvement and registry cleanup utilities have done
anything beyond minor improvements.

I have a machine in the office setup to dual boot W2K and XP. It
spends most of its life running XP. I use it to demonstrate the speed
difference between W2K and XP. For system level operations (copying
files, scanning for viruses, burning DVD's) the speed is about the
same. However, for CPU and memory intensive tasks (CAD, spread***
benchmarks, rendering, batch photo edits), W2K is about twice as fast.
I have a similar dual boot setup for comparing Vista and XP, but
unfortunately have not done much in the way of benchmarking. My
general impression is that XP is considerably faster than Vista for
just about everything, but don't have any numbers yet.

Of course i have been Linuxing since the early W98 days as well. WINE
is so good now that i can run almost all of my legacy applications
now. Just a few more really old ones and one new one and i will be
able to sell off my excess XP licence/install media, new and sealed
original factory packaging.

Sigh. I maintain a few Linux systems. They're all servers, not
desktops. I have a Compaq P4 2.4Ghz box where I install various Linux
desktop mutations, with the intention of it eventually becoming my
main desktop. However, since there's no revenue generated in this
exercise, the box just sits there, doing nothing most of the time. By
the time I find time to work on it, the next release is out and I have
to start over. Incidentally, my main machine and mail server is a
486DX40 with 8MBytes of RAM running SCO ODT 3.2v4.2 from about 1988.
I've been planning a Linux replacement since Yiggdrasil 0.98.3. I
recently found a long forgotten DNS server running RH 2.1.

Incidentally, I had an odd thing happen on eBay yesterday. I needed
some Compaq laptop Windoze XP installation media. I found what I
wanted on eBay and submitted a bit. A bit later, I received an email
from eBay informing me that the auction had been withdrawn by eBay
apparently due to some kind of policy violation. I've bought such
recovery CD's on eBay in the past, so this is something new (to me).
Apparently, Microsoft is getting a bit more aggressive in its campaign
to kill off XP.



--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.