Home computer problem

[Doug Miller]

When they first brought it out, they said it stood for New Technology. Dunno what they say *now*.

[notbob]

Nonsense. USB, OK, but I've booted DOS 6.22 on boxes with 20G HDDs, no problem.

Bingo! I still have floppies of w98 dos, dos 6.22, and w2k boot floppies with its virtual dos, in case I run into crippled Windows boxes. I no longer fess to knowing how, but I've got 'em jes the same.

nb

[notbob]

We finally agree on something! OTOH, fat FSs are still everywhere. All those flash drives are fat FS.

nb

[notbob]

Thank you. I suspect real world experience, here. ;)

nb

[notbob]

And w95-w98* wasn't? I never experienced w2k crashing once per hour.

nb

[Robert Green]

The DEC PDP-10 "died" (no more were made) right around the same time as the IBM PC was born - sometime in the early 80's. In 1986 I switched over an application in Dbase II or III (CRS!) from XT's to AT's that had their 6MHz clock limiters in BIOS replaced with hand-modified BIOS chips based on something I'd read in Byte magazine. Got hold of a PROM burner and speeded it up with no ill effects. Apparently IBM had throttled the early AT's, hoping to charge more for the same product without the artificial speed limitation. Now THAT was a increase in speed. Reports from a 40,000 document database that took all night to run would run in under an hour. Part of that increase came from a huge full size Seagate 40MB hard disk that would shake the desk when it did wide-ranging seeks. Cost $800!!!!! ($20 per megabyte)

Now, $800 can (on sale!) buy you 16 TERABYTES of drive space.

Let's see $50 per terabyte, 5 cents per gigabyte, .0005 cents per megabyte. Ouch!

I assume that was 25 to 30 years ago. I just couldn't imagine any new hardware thrashing for hours. New machines get where they are going in a hurry; even if it's just the BSOD. They go so fast that old programs that relied on timing loops (bad idea anyway) would just hang when they landed on a much newer machine than they were written for. The new CPU's were so fast that timing loops didn't actually delay anything. Mostly games were affected by that, but some serious programs as well IIRC. On the other hand, some stuff I wrote for 386/16's still runs (Pascal, Access, Foxpro & DbaseII/III/IV) on newer machines and so quickly that screens pop up almost instantaneously.

Each version of MS's OS are more or less mated to the hardware that was available at the time. Win95 wouldn't know what to do with a SATA drive or, IIRC, a fast IDE drive. It was born when drives were connected using twin ribbon cables with MFM encoding via the ST-506 protocol.

I've come to learn that OS's are so dependent on their hardware that people can end up thinking W2K is a POS because their hardware didn't support it well enough. When I bought out a whole medical group's old Fujitsu

3400/3500 tablets, I began to realize how well they were optimized and debugged for both Win98SE and W2K. They just never crash. Really. Lockups on any of the 15 machines I have are incredibly rare. Much rarer than any desktop I ever ran W2K on. From what I know, Fujitsu and MS worked very closely as these were the first *serious* touchscreen tablets and were meant to revolutionize the medical industry (they didn't). Best part about them is they draw 17W max compared to the nearly 200W that my newer desktops draw. All configurations the same, all Ghost images are interchangeable, very, very sweet deal considering I was paying less than 10 cents on the dollar for them. The I-Pad 10 years before Apple "invented it." (-:

That's a side benefit of a tablet or laptop. They are all much likely to be of the same configuration as one another and that makes eliminating bad OS/HW interactions much easier, especially if the HW manufacturer works closely with the OS maker. None of the desktops I've owned or worked on showed any of the stability that the Fujitsu tablets. Given how much I despise MS, it pains me to praise them but they got it right that time.

I suspect the troubles lots of people experience with W2K is because the desktops could have wildly varying configurations. Lots of desktops have high-end graphics cards (a real challenge for OS writers) or some other specialized hardware that caused problems. I remember thinking the "Hardware Acceleration" slider should have been named "Likelihood of Crashing Unexpectedly" slider.

With laptops/tablets, there are no slots (to speak of) so the hardware always initializes in the same order (unless you override it in BIOS). You're stuck with the video card that's in there (not 100%, but mostly - I just bought an external video card that works via USB). However, the manufacturer usually gets the video drivers in such machines right a lot sooner than add-in card makers like ATI.

Since I was a big fan of their All-in-Wonder TV/Video cards, I got a real education in "the driver of the month" and which upgrades giveth and which taketh away. You'd get to like one of their often very clever features, load the latest drivers and "POOF" away that feature would go. One machine that had one of the first Digital Audio Labs digital audio cards (interfacing directly with Sony DAT recorders) NEVER worked right with anything other than a plain vanilla ISA video card.

-- Bobby G.

[The Daring Dufas]

I setup and ran small business networks with Win2K and QuickBooks accounting software. The setup was fairly reliable and like anything that's properly implemented, is virtually trouble free. You must put the fear of God into any secretary who plugs an electric heater under her desk into the same power as the computer and make sure a customer knows that the computer is to never be set directly on the carpet under or beside a desk and to never have file folders or papers stuffed around the thing blocking the airflow. It's the little details that keep business systems running. I have some horror stories about computer abuse and their eventual rescue from tormentors. I'm going to look at a catering outfit tomorrow and recommend thin clients using a server installed a protected air conditioned location. We'll put all the main electronic gear in the same room.

TDD

[Ed Pawlowski]

I don't doubt that it is doing the job it was designed for, but to curse "planned obsolescence" after 13 years is kind of over the top for electronics. You can still buy CRT TV's too, but few are sold. WinXP and W7 are far better in many respects than any of the former operating systems so there is no reason to stop improving.

At work we have XP machines and have no intention of upgrading until they start to fail in a few years, but they have been solid performers for what we do. At that time W8 or W9 will be the choice.

[HeyBub]

For a while is was "Newer" Technology. Now I think it's "Newest" Technology.

[HeyBub]

One of the features of NTFS is its self-healing capacity. That is, it can detect and repair single-bit errors. That's completely unnecessary with thumb drives inasmuch as they're gonna fail after a few thousand cycles anyway.

[Robert Green]

I agree. I could keep W2K running for a fairly long time between reboots, not so with 95. There was a positive abortion in Win ME - didn't see too much of that OS. XP tries too much to "help" me. I have to reconfigure it substantially to make it comfortable for me. With W2K, setting up the OS meant changing some stuff in Explorer and renaming ACTORS to DEADACTORS to kill Clippy, the most annoying "helper" that's ever been inflicted on me.

XP, on the other hand, apparently must have had years of research that resulted in menus magically reconfiguring themselves (a big it with people who could barely remember where things were on static menus!) and an OS that's always asking you to make decisions. "Would you like to . . . " There should be a global setting marked "Stay out my effing way you solder-tailed scold." Or something like Samuel Jackson in "Pulp Fiction" when he says to the kid "Say WHAT again!"

-- Bobby G.

[Doug Miller]

I never experienced that with 98 either.

[notbob]

Ye gads, I'd forgotten that nightmare. At least you could turn it off.

LOL! I gotta wonder at how many monitors/laptops have actually been retired early by small arms fire by infuriated users having to close one popup too many.

There is a way to stop all that nonsense, but it's neither intuitive nor for the faint of heart.

nb

[notbob]

I ended up using w98se, which was the best of the 98s. It rarely crashed. OTOH, I never had to use it in a heavy enterprise situation, like a CAD workstation. My beef with w98se was it jes wasn't secure. No matter what I did or what security software I ran, no matter how many firewalls, the exploits were overwhelming. Like I said, after the 4th drive-by dwnld, I quit M$ altogether. Haven't had a hiccup since.

I also think a lot of the problem is client-side scripts. Lotta exploits, there. If I'd had NoScript back then, I'm sure Ida seen much less grief.

nb

[clare]

And XP over any pre-7 system.

XP sp3 is about as bullet-proof an OS as Microsoft has ever come up with - and as good as most competitors.

7 seems to be pretty good too.

[clare]

Windows New Technology

[Congoleum Breckenridge]

Also means "Not There" according to Apple back then.

[Doug Miller]

Absolutely this *will* (not just "could") make a difference. Windows is looking for a file called hosts, not hosts.txt.

Yes. At a command prompt, type "ren hosts.txt hosts" (without the quotes).

Or open it up in Notepad, click File | Save As, then enter the name as "hosts" (this time, *with* the quotes -- that tells Notepad not to append .txt to the filename).

[krw]

My experience was exactly the opposite. 2K was the reason I stopped using OS/2. It was stable enough (NT4 wasn't). It's been all downhill since.

[krw]

Really? No shit?!

Utter nonsense.

Different topic.