Why do you still use Windows XP?

"BillW50" wrote in :

Oh really? I loaded lots of crap at boot with Windows 98. And what is
the deal with no AV? As I totally believe for total protection all you
need is a stealth firewall (a router works too) and a real time AV
scanner.

I agree about the firewall, but no AV here. Instead, I use the firewall to
catch anything trying to get online. The only other thing a virus might
profit from is nuking its host, so I watch the boot sector and keep backups
of it (and entire OS partition images).

AV sounds useful, but there are many false positives, especially when
'heuristics' are used. Looking for specific signatures is a bit like a doctor
taking a blood sample, finding sickle cell anemia, 'deducing' that the
pateint is likely black and therefore a thief! Harsh, but the analogy is fair
in principle if not in degree (and plenty of innocent program writers will
agree, as all it takes is ONE major false positive published as if it were
a certainty, to seriously harm their reputations). At least with a good anti-
trojan, we catch the thief by his actions.

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:11:27 -0600, wrote:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:38:21 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:


You did a great job of comparing the versions of Windows.
3.1 sucked, 95 needed help, but 98 was and still is the best.

I guess we all have opinions, and it's no surprise that they differ. I
would say 98 was the best for a very short time, only until 98SE
became available. After that, 98SE was only best until 2000 became
available. Then XP became the best, and now 7 is the best. IMHO, WinME
and Vista never carried the crown, but it seems completely whack to
claim that an OS that was long ago obsolete was and is best. I guess
there's no single definition for 'best'.

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:19:53 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"Mayayana" wrote in news:jhjnds$320$1@dont-
email.me:

No, they lied. They offered a driver download. And they said
there was no Win9x version. But they didn't mention that
actually the drivers were not theirs in the first place. The
drivers are for the chipset. The chipset was Via. Via
supported Win98. To offer repackaged drivers but say Win98
is not supported was deliberately misleading.... which was known
as "lying" in the days before P.C. speech.


It is at least seriously disingenous.

I don't see how.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:24:00 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Char Jackson wrote in
m:

I completely disagree. You seem to be confused about the meaning of
the word 'support'. You originally said above that Asus or MSI said
your OS was no longer supported. They get to make that decision, and
whatever they say, goes. The fact that you found a driver somewhere
else doesn't change anything.


Actually it does. They can claim not to support it, but they cannot claim
that it 'is not supported' as if that is universal.

Now you're playing word games. I don't know what they claimed.
Everything I know about it came from this thread, and I saw no
evidence of the mobo maker lying in this thread. They get to choose
what they support or not.


Of course. Not contesting that. What they do NOT have a right to do is use
another firm's drivers, as if they were their own, and attempt to claim that
the limited support is universal when the original supplier does offer that
support. The ONE exception is if there is some specific written clause in
their contract with the driver supplier than lets them do it.

Most times I've seen drivers supplied with hardware, and they are a variant
of Via's generic ones, this is clearly stated by the people supplying the
board, as an option if I want to take it. WHich strongly suggests they are
keeping their legalites in order as much as anything else.

If I'm reading you correctly, when you see "not supported" you assume
it means "not supported by anyone, not supported at all", where I
assume it means "not supported by us". If support was found elsewhere,
that's great, but it doesn't mean anyone lied.


Note that 'lying' wasn't my charge. I just agreed with Mayayana to some
extent, sayign that is at least disingenous. It is, given that they likely
knew what he also discovered to be true.

I'm not actually playing with words. (You'll know too well when I do that.
The vagueness of this interpretation is exactly what is being used to lead
people to beleive that the OEM's limitation is over-riding, when it isn't.
The equipment manufacturer has control (are legally to BOUND to it in fact)
over the way they use the product they receive and add to their own. They can
limit support and abilities to maintain that in ways they feel safe with
(especially important in laser hardware), but they can't make claims on
limits on original parts fitted to that hardware. They have to say that THEY
limited it, or alternatively specify the end product without reference to
the parts used. To do otherwise likely infringes claims made by their own
suppliers.

I'm not a judge so I won't try to say which one will win in law, but I bet
either interpretation could, depending who spent the mosty money on lawyers's
time to keep pushing their angle. There may ne a test case, but I don't know
if there is or not.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:19:53 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"Mayayana" wrote in news:jhjnds$320$1@dont-
email.me:

No, they lied. They offered a driver download. And they said
there was no Win9x version. But they didn't mention that
actually the drivers were not theirs in the first place. The
drivers are for the chipset. The chipset was Via. Via
supported Win98. To offer repackaged drivers but say Win98
is not supported was deliberately misleading.... which was known
as "lying" in the days before P.C. speech.


It is at least seriously disingenous.

I don't see how.



I just posted about that.. Basically, unless Via gave them leave to claim
less for the Via driver and chipset, they're limited to making claims ONLY
about their own end product.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:11:27 -0600, wrote:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:38:21 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:


You did a great job of comparing the versions of Windows.
3.1 sucked, 95 needed help, but 98 was and still is the best.

I guess we all have opinions, and it's no surprise that they differ. I
would say 98 was the best for a very short time, only until 98SE
became available. After that, 98SE was only best until 2000 became
available. Then XP became the best, and now 7 is the best. IMHO, WinME
and Vista never carried the crown, but it seems completely whack to
claim that an OS that was long ago obsolete was and is best. I guess
there's no single definition for 'best'.



Context is everything. If we want a strong 32 bit Windows API, but also want
easy boots to real mode and DOS, then W98 SE is pretty much the only game in
town. Add NUSB and a few other things like 48 bit LBA addressing, and it
starts to give later OS'a a fast run for their money. I'd never argue that it
was absolute best in any way, but I'd also never give it up. I might use
other stuff, as I do at times, but W98 SE in minimal and improved form is
amazing.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:11:27 -0600, wrote:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:38:21 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:


You did a great job of comparing the versions of Windows.
3.1 sucked, 95 needed help, but 98 was and still is the best.

I guess we all have opinions, and it's no surprise that they differ. I
would say 98 was the best for a very short time, only until 98SE
became available. After that, 98SE was only best until 2000 became
available. Then XP became the best, and now 7 is the best. IMHO, WinME
and Vista never carried the crown, but it seems completely whack to
claim that an OS that was long ago obsolete was and is best. I guess
there's no single definition for 'best'.

Why is "7" the best? What does it offer over XP (besides extra bloat) for
a seasoned veteran?

On 17/02/2012 00:18, Bill in Co wrote:
Char Jackson wrote:
On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:11:27 -0600, wrote:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:38:21 -0600, wrote:


You did a great job of comparing the versions of Windows.
3.1 sucked, 95 needed help, but 98 was and still is the best.

I guess we all have opinions, and it's no surprise that they differ. I
would say 98 was the best for a very short time, only until 98SE
became available. After that, 98SE was only best until 2000 became
available. Then XP became the best, and now 7 is the best. IMHO, WinME
and Vista never carried the crown, but it seems completely whack to
claim that an OS that was long ago obsolete was and is best. I guess
there's no single definition for 'best'.

Why is "7" the best? What does it offer over XP (besides extra bloat) for
a seasoned veteran?

Let's admit that Windows 7 does have a few improvements over Windows XP
but the fact is that certain changes have been made just for the sake of
change and not always for the better. It would have made more sense to
have had a Windows XP v2.0 but then would MS have sold as many copies?
Or would laptop manufacturers have sold as many NEW laptops?

But ne'er worry. Soon we'll have Windows 8 that will right some things
and mess up other things. And so it goes on... All in the name of
progress... though sometimes we have to take a backward step just to
make life complicated. Windows Media Center springs to mind here... Nice
GUI but crap as a practical interface!


-- choro

BillW50 wrote:

I see. And that would bother me. As early 2006 machines just
doesn't cut it for me today. Although later 2006 to 2008 are
my favorite machines. I am not impressed with newer machines
than that.

What makes 2006 a dividing line in PC technology, may I ask?

You are running W98 with SATA drives? How do you get that too
work?

The SATA-1 interface became common-place in many chipsets starting in
about 2003. It was present in the Intel ICHR-5 chipset (the 865 and 875
chips) and was also present in VIA chipsets (and others).

Win-9x/ME drivers exist for all SATA-I controller chips (the SiL 34xx
and 35xx being the most popular). Today, if you stop by any computer
store and have a look at the typical $15 PCI 2-port SATA card, it will
have the SiL chips and it will come with a small CD with drivers -
including 9x/me drivers.

For my own win-98 PC's, when hard drives began to transition across the
200 to 250 gb size (back in what - 2006 or 2007?) I found that using
SATA drives on win-98 became a logical alternative or solution to the
137 gb problem that is experienced with conventional IDE (PATA) drives.

Win-9x/me is limited to 137 gb hard-drive size because of the
ESDI_506.PDR driver. This limitation never did exist with 3'rd party
SATA drive controllers and their supplied drivers - so that's why I can
attach hard drives up to 2 tb to my win-98 systems.

You should note that Win-XP (SP0) was also limited to 137 gb hard-drive
size. This was fixed in 2002 with XP-SP1 - but naturally Micro$haft did
not issue a patched ESDI_506.PDR for win-98 for strategic reasons.

Others have created their own patch for ESDI_506.pdr (they are widely
available) that allow IDE drives larger than 137 gb to be used by
win-98, but I'm not interested in them because all my drives larger than
80 gb are SATA drives.

And what good is 512MB or even 1GB of RAM for a W98 machine?

You're joking - right?

And you're the one complaining about win-98 having system-resource
problems? Now I know why...

Sure I have added more RAM than 64MB to a W98 machine before.
But I never saw any advantages to using more.

Same reasons that you wouldn't want to run XP with less than 512 mb ram.

You see, something just doesn't sound right to me. As my
experience with such stuff in the past was they are never
quite as great as the claims.

That's understandable if you baled on win-98 in 2000 or 2001 and never
looked back.

I've never left win-98. What I have done is to leave old hardware
behind build new PC's every few years and put win-98 right back on
them. That's why I know how well it can work if you give it decent
hardware - same goes for NT-based OS's as well.

The last year or two, using FF2 I thought it stunk.

I find it does a good job of rendering web pages.

And I give it a huge handicap - I have a large hosts file (to block a
lot of tracking done by google, facebook, twitter, doubleclick, etc).
When you block a lot of junk servers using your hosts file, the browser
can end up screwing up what a web-page is supposed to look like. but
that's ok, because I usually only want to read the text that's on the
page - I don't care if the formatting has been a little screwed up
because none of the advertizing has been rendered.

People say using IE6 is bad at rendering nowadays.

It is. IE6 has been a horror show for the past 4 or 5 years.

Heck that is nothing compared to how bad pages look
under FF2.

You need to do more homework. IE6 is universally recognized as a highly
non-compliant browser. Macro$haft designed it that way on purpose - to
twist web-conventions to suit their own needs and plans at the time.

I simply don't have resource problems - and I have a taskbar
with usually 10 or 20 apps running at any given time.

Yeah I could open 50 Notepads with Windows 3.1 too.

No - more like 10 or 20 instances of firefox, outlook 2000, the program
I'm using to read news right now (netscape 4.7).

Mayayana wrote:

There's also a patch to allow CPUs over 2.2 GHz:

Windows 98 (first edition) had an issue with one file (ndis.vxd I think)
that had a problem when the CPU speed exceeded 2.2 ghz:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312108

=====================================
When you are installing Windows 95 or Windows 98 on a computer that has
a CPU that runs at 2.2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, you may receive the
following error message:

While initializing device NDIS: Windows protection error

The timing calibration code in the Network Driver Interface
Specification (NDIS) driver causes a divide by zero if the CPU runs at
2.2 GHz or faster. This problem does not occur with CPUs that run at 2.1
GHz or slower.
=====================================

Even though Microsoft says it will not / did not issue a fix for that,
that was infact a lie. They did issue a free hot-fix when that KB was
listed as Q312108.

But that really doesn't matter, because it became well known that simply
replacing that file with the one from Windows 98SE or Windows ME would
solve that problem.

Windows 98 (second edition) has no known issue with any cpu clock speed
or anything relating to the speed of the chipset, memory,
front-side-bus, etc.