wrote in
:

snip

If I am ever forced to switch to XP, I will send my
computer to the town dump and give up computing. I hated
XP when it first came out, and I still hate it.

It /is/ ridiculous. You are lucky not to have tried using the
Pro version (I will assume that since you bought a demo machine
from a normal store, it came with Home preloaded).

I was FORCED to install XP on another partition because I have
an analog video card and they do NOT come with drivers for
anything except XP, Vista and 7. That is the ONLY thing I use it
for.

Well, VLC for XP /is/ better than the no-longer in development
version for 98 - although the interface is ****ED, since it was
designed for XP.

Everything XP is a ****ING NIGHTMARE. Programs which were a
delight on 9x are a NIGHTMARE on XP (not because they are "not
compatible", but because XP is INSANE). 16-bit programs which
the DEVELOPER says will not run on XP run fine. What a ****ing
scam.

/thanatoid listens to the ongoing sounds of bleating sheep
carrying XP and Vista and Win7 laptops outside his windows.../

I have a
much newer and faster computer which I bought with XP on
it. It was a brand new demo computer which sold cheap,
shortly before Vista hit the market. I tried to force
myself to use it and like it. I really did try hard. It's
now in the closet collecting dust.

It's not that difficult to put 98 on it. Basically, make a CD-R
(or 2 or 3) from the original XP hard drive "restore" section.
[I understand those sections/hidden partitions/MS mind ****s
exist somewhere, but the fact you do not just get the ****ing
original disks is one of the reasons I will never buy a computer
with preloaded Windows (not to mention I am never touching what
MS is selling these days to begin with).]

Then you wipe the drive and partition it. 5-10 GB partitions are
good. You can have up to 23 and it makes life a LOT easier. I
used to have 16 on a 40 (forty) GB drive and it was GREAT.

Install 98SE.

(I /strongly/ recommend using Lite from www.litepc.com. 95 was
better than 98 except for no USB. The Maximus Decim Native USB
ver. 3.1 driver for 98 works, but installing it on 98SE lite
with its 3 main sys files from 95B is a major pain. It can be
done, though.)

Install XP to another partition. It will create a dual-boot menu
automatically.

Instead of using that 3
or 4 year old computer with 5 times the power of this one,
I still use my trusty 10 year old computer with Win98se.
Everything about XP is annoying at the least, if not
downright repulsive to me.

Amen.

When the weather gets cold, I might see if I can install
Win98 on it. I'll just unplug the XP hard drive and use
another drive to see what happens.

That is another, VERY simple way of doing it. Unless it is a
tiny toy box, you do NOT have to remove the original drive. Just
put in the second drive and make IT bootable in the BIOS. Use
the other drive for backup or whatever.

The only reason I'll
save the drive containing XP, is for resale value, because
I will never use XP, or Vista, and probably not Windows7
which looks a lot like XP to me.

On top of that, the XP installation was formatted with
NTFS, and if I can not access my data from dos, its not
going to be saved on my computer. That NTFS format is a
guarantee to losing all important data.

Amen.

But I guess all
factory installations of XP come with that crappy format.
Because of that format alone, I never used the computer. I
changed the look of the desktop, and that's all I ever did
with it. I never went online or used it for anything else.
I could not even figure out how to get it to connect to my
internet service, which is very easy to do in Win98.

XP is horrid, and combined with NTFS, makes a computer
worthless for anything where a person values their data,
which I do.

Amen.

I should mention that on my Win98 computer, I can dual boot
to Windows 2000 for the rare occasion I cant get some
software to work in 98. Win2K is tolerable, but I bet I
load it 10X a year at most. At least it's on the same
Fat32 drive I use for 98, so I can access all my date.

The same thing can be done with XP, see above. You can choose to
install XP with FAT32 instead of the NeuteredTrashForSuckers
"file system".


--
"Anytime I hear the word "culture", I reach for my iPad."
- 21st Century Humanoid