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#1
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gotta say.. so long ME
I'm am almost dissapointed to do this, afterall, ME has been a fine
performer eversince I discovered this ng and other ME forums on the 'net to help me tame ME enough to be able to believe that I would never need to move to XP, ...but recently, I've been very disappointed in ME's performance and reliability eversince I changed my video card to a newer and "better" one (worked ok for a while - it only caused a problem with Shutdown), and eversince I upped the ram from 256 to 768. The various tweaks to fool ME to limit it to 512 or LESS is not working. I am actually running out of resources sooner! Very annoying. The whole idea of adding more ram was to be able to use it. There was a modest speed boost in screen rendering, and application loading with the extra ram, but I still can't seem to have more apps open at the same time which I need. So.. I'm moving on to Ubuntu. The winapps that I absolutely need will be hosted on my XP'd Thinkpad. ME first came into my life when I purchased a new 1gHz, AGP 2x 64meg, 256meg ram, 40gig box in year 2000. The first upgrade it ever needed was a critical one - a new 120gig hdd. About 3 years into its life ME had started to insist on Scandisk at every boot (even after successful scandisk and Shutdown), plus the 40gig drive produced strange intermittent clunking noises. The new 120gig hdd solved that problem. But interestingly.. that same 40gig hdd is now parked into a "spare" 500mHz 256meg ram pc, loaded with Ubuntu, and there are NO problems. We've probably all been hanging on to ME because we're adamant to not dish out more $'s to MS. If your needs for faster processor, more ram, and new programs do not exist, then ME should serve you well. I really really really wanted to believe that ME would serve me well for the rest of my days with modest upgrades as required. Afterall, I upgraded the original box with USB 2.0 and even replaced the original NIC. ME continued to perform well. But all I really wanted was to be able to load atleast 3 apps in memory (Wordperfect, my browser, and WindowsExplorer as I navigated through files over my network). Suddenly, Explorer.exe would close and fail to reload the Taskbar apps! The only solution was to reboot. Very time consuming and frustrating. Then when I learned that ME is theoretically limited to 512meg ram and that the only way to use more ram is to trick ME to think there is LESS, that disappointed me. Under those conditions it's better to get a new OS that can handle that. And.. I really don't want to spend more $'s on a new box when I've already invested in a fine 120gig hdd, USB 2.0 expansion, 768meg total ram, and a better (DVI-capable) video card. My appreciation and many thanks go out to all the fine folks who helped me with my ME questions over the years. I enjoyed helping the few people with my insights too when I could. ...Ogg. |
#2
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gotta say.. so long ME
Sorry to read you're leaving and all the best for the future.
I am actually running out of resources sooner! Not that, as you well know, the term resources as used by Win 9x systems, have anything to do with the amount of RAM installed but rather the fixed size 64KB stack used to store 16 bit pointers and the like. Nevertheless no Win 9x system is particularly good at multi-tasking with the stack size being one of the major limiting factors. -- Mike M Ogg wrote: I'm am almost dissapointed to do this, afterall, ME has been a fine performer eversince I discovered this ng and other ME forums on the 'net to help me tame ME enough to be able to believe that I would never need to move to XP, ...but recently, I've been very disappointed in ME's performance and reliability eversince I changed my video card to a newer and "better" one (worked ok for a while - it only caused a problem with Shutdown), and eversince I upped the ram from 256 to 768. The various tweaks to fool ME to limit it to 512 or LESS is not working. I am actually running out of resources sooner! Very annoying. The whole idea of adding more ram was to be able to use it. There was a modest speed boost in screen rendering, and application loading with the extra ram, but I still can't seem to have more apps open at the same time which I need. So.. I'm moving on to Ubuntu. The winapps that I absolutely need will be hosted on my XP'd Thinkpad. ME first came into my life when I purchased a new 1gHz, AGP 2x 64meg, 256meg ram, 40gig box in year 2000. The first upgrade it ever needed was a critical one - a new 120gig hdd. About 3 years into its life ME had started to insist on Scandisk at every boot (even after successful scandisk and Shutdown), plus the 40gig drive produced strange intermittent clunking noises. The new 120gig hdd solved that problem. But interestingly.. that same 40gig hdd is now parked into a "spare" 500mHz 256meg ram pc, loaded with Ubuntu, and there are NO problems. We've probably all been hanging on to ME because we're adamant to not dish out more $'s to MS. If your needs for faster processor, more ram, and new programs do not exist, then ME should serve you well. I really really really wanted to believe that ME would serve me well for the rest of my days with modest upgrades as required. Afterall, I upgraded the original box with USB 2.0 and even replaced the original NIC. ME continued to perform well. But all I really wanted was to be able to load atleast 3 apps in memory (Wordperfect, my browser, and WindowsExplorer as I navigated through files over my network). Suddenly, Explorer.exe would close and fail to reload the Taskbar apps! The only solution was to reboot. Very time consuming and frustrating. Then when I learned that ME is theoretically limited to 512meg ram and that the only way to use more ram is to trick ME to think there is LESS, that disappointed me. Under those conditions it's better to get a new OS that can handle that. And.. I really don't want to spend more $'s on a new box when I've already invested in a fine 120gig hdd, USB 2.0 expansion, 768meg total ram, and a better (DVI-capable) video card. My appreciation and many thanks go out to all the fine folks who helped me with my ME questions over the years. I enjoyed helping the few people with my insights too when I could. ..Ogg. |
#3
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gotta say.. so long ME
Ogg:
To echo Mike, sorry to see you leave. Suppose we'll find you at "nntp.aioe.org" under "alt.os.linux.ubuntu"? Myself I plan to keep ME and run ubuntu as dual boot, if that's possible. There's no reson for me to "trash" WinME, since it's running quite nicely. Harry. "Ogg" wrote in message ... I'm am almost dissapointed to do this, afterall, ME has been a fine performer eversince I discovered this ng and other ME forums on the 'net to help me tame ME enough to be able to believe that I would never need to move to XP, ...but recently, I've been very disappointed in ME's performance and reliability eversince I changed my video card to a newer and "better" one (worked ok for a while - it only caused a problem with Shutdown), and eversince I upped the ram from 256 to 768. The various tweaks to fool ME to limit it to 512 or LESS is not working. I am actually running out of resources sooner! Very annoying. The whole idea of adding more ram was to be able to use it. There was a modest speed boost in screen rendering, and application loading with the extra ram, but I still can't seem to have more apps open at the same time which I need. So.. I'm moving on to Ubuntu. The winapps that I absolutely need will be hosted on my XP'd Thinkpad. ME first came into my life when I purchased a new 1gHz, AGP 2x 64meg, 256meg ram, 40gig box in year 2000. The first upgrade it ever needed was a critical one - a new 120gig hdd. About 3 years into its life ME had started to insist on Scandisk at every boot (even after successful scandisk and Shutdown), plus the 40gig drive produced strange intermittent clunking noises. The new 120gig hdd solved that problem. But interestingly.. that same 40gig hdd is now parked into a "spare" 500mHz 256meg ram pc, loaded with Ubuntu, and there are NO problems. We've probably all been hanging on to ME because we're adamant to not dish out more $'s to MS. If your needs for faster processor, more ram, and new programs do not exist, then ME should serve you well. I really really really wanted to believe that ME would serve me well for the rest of my days with modest upgrades as required. Afterall, I upgraded the original box with USB 2.0 and even replaced the original NIC. ME continued to perform well. But all I really wanted was to be able to load atleast 3 apps in memory (Wordperfect, my browser, and WindowsExplorer as I navigated through files over my network). Suddenly, Explorer.exe would close and fail to reload the Taskbar apps! The only solution was to reboot. Very time consuming and frustrating. Then when I learned that ME is theoretically limited to 512meg ram and that the only way to use more ram is to trick ME to think there is LESS, that disappointed me. Under those conditions it's better to get a new OS that can handle that. And.. I really don't want to spend more $'s on a new box when I've already invested in a fine 120gig hdd, USB 2.0 expansion, 768meg total ram, and a better (DVI-capable) video card. My appreciation and many thanks go out to all the fine folks who helped me with my ME questions over the years. I enjoyed helping the few people with my insights too when I could. ..Ogg. |
#4
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gotta say.. so long ME
Be sure that your system's compatible with XP. Valuable information can be
found here = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316639 You'll especially find the Upgrade Advisor useful = http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/advisor.mspx Note that despite their recommendation of 128MB RAM, I'd run, IMHO, 512MB minimum. Having been a strong advocate of ME for many years, I've not been dissapointed with XP which took over a year to throw up an error message. Note that I didn't upgrade but bought a new system due to hardware incompatibility with the old system. Best of Luck! "Ogg" wrote in message ... I'm am almost dissapointed to do this, afterall, ME has been a fine performer eversince I discovered this ng and other ME forums on the 'net to help me tame ME enough to be able to believe that I would never need to move to XP, ...but recently, I've been very disappointed in ME's performance and reliability eversince I changed my video card to a newer and "better" one (worked ok for a while - it only caused a problem with Shutdown), and eversince I upped the ram from 256 to 768. The various tweaks to fool ME to limit it to 512 or LESS is not working. I am actually running out of resources sooner! Very annoying. The whole idea of adding more ram was to be able to use it. There was a modest speed boost in screen rendering, and application loading with the extra ram, but I still can't seem to have more apps open at the same time which I need. So.. I'm moving on to Ubuntu. The winapps that I absolutely need will be hosted on my XP'd Thinkpad. ME first came into my life when I purchased a new 1gHz, AGP 2x 64meg, 256meg ram, 40gig box in year 2000. The first upgrade it ever needed was a critical one - a new 120gig hdd. About 3 years into its life ME had started to insist on Scandisk at every boot (even after successful scandisk and Shutdown), plus the 40gig drive produced strange intermittent clunking noises. The new 120gig hdd solved that problem. But interestingly.. that same 40gig hdd is now parked into a "spare" 500mHz 256meg ram pc, loaded with Ubuntu, and there are NO problems. We've probably all been hanging on to ME because we're adamant to not dish out more $'s to MS. If your needs for faster processor, more ram, and new programs do not exist, then ME should serve you well. I really really really wanted to believe that ME would serve me well for the rest of my days with modest upgrades as required. Afterall, I upgraded the original box with USB 2.0 and even replaced the original NIC. ME continued to perform well. But all I really wanted was to be able to load atleast 3 apps in memory (Wordperfect, my browser, and WindowsExplorer as I navigated through files over my network). Suddenly, Explorer.exe would close and fail to reload the Taskbar apps! The only solution was to reboot. Very time consuming and frustrating. Then when I learned that ME is theoretically limited to 512meg ram and that the only way to use more ram is to trick ME to think there is LESS, that disappointed me. Under those conditions it's better to get a new OS that can handle that. And.. I really don't want to spend more $'s on a new box when I've already invested in a fine 120gig hdd, USB 2.0 expansion, 768meg total ram, and a better (DVI-capable) video card. My appreciation and many thanks go out to all the fine folks who helped me with my ME questions over the years. I enjoyed helping the few people with my insights too when I could. ..Ogg. |
#5
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gotta say.. so long ME
"KB" wrote in message ... Be sure that your system's compatible with XP. Valuable information can be found here = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316639 You'll especially find the Upgrade Advisor useful = http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/advisor.mspx Note that despite their recommendation of 128MB RAM, I'd run, IMHO, 512MB minimum. Having been a strong advocate of ME for many years, I've not been dissapointed with XP which took over a year to throw up an error message. Note that I didn't upgrade but bought a new system due to hardware incompatibility with the old system. They recommend 128MB? It does run OK on 128MB. I believe it does run on 64MB though. Of course 512MB is nicer, but so is 2GB. The more RAM you give it, the smoother it will run. If you do anything that uses much RAM, it will just use the swap file if it runs out. Just make sure you keep enough free HD space. Same goes for any OS. Win98 can run on 16MB, Vista can run on 1GB maybe even less. The more you get, the smoother they run. If you increase any one component past a certain point, you just shift the bottleneck. Any one piece can be the weakest link for performance (CPU, RAM, video speed, video RAM, BUS, HD...). |
#6
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gotta say.. so long ME
Eric wrote:
"KB" wrote in message ... Be sure that your system's compatible with XP. Valuable information can be found here = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316639 You'll especially find the Upgrade Advisor useful = http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/advisor.mspx Note that despite their recommendation of 128MB RAM, I'd run, IMHO, 512MB minimum. Having been a strong advocate of ME for many years, I've not been dissapointed with XP which took over a year to throw up an error message. Note that I didn't upgrade but bought a new system due to hardware incompatibility with the old system. They recommend 128MB? It does run OK on 128MB. I believe it does run on 64MB though. Of course 512MB is nicer, but so is 2GB. The more RAM you give it, the smoother it will run. If you do anything that uses much RAM, it will just use the swap file if it runs out. Just make sure you keep enough free HD space. Same goes for any OS. Win98 can run on 16MB, Vista can run on 1GB maybe even less. The more you get, the smoother they run. If you increase any one component past a certain point, you just shift the bottleneck. Any one piece can be the weakest link for performance (CPU, RAM, video speed, video RAM, BUS, HD...). Above a certain amount of RAM any additional RAM added to the machine is just a waste of money and it will not make the computer run any faster or smoother. Where that "magic" amount lies depends on what you do with your computer and what type of applications you run, if your computer is not paging then adding extra RAM will do nothing to make your computer run better, faster or smoother. Many XP users, I would say half or more of XP users, don't need much more than 512MB of RAM and other than those doing multimedia/AV editing or those running CAD/CAM and very large spreadsheets or other demanding programs few users ever need or use more than 1GB. Users who barely use 512MB will not see a bit of difference when adding additional RAM to their computers. We see occasional posts in the XP groups where users have increased RAM from 512MB or 768MB to 1GB and more and they disappointedly report no performance gains. The reason they see no gains is that they weren't using what they already had to work with. John |
#7
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gotta say.. so long ME
"John John" wrote in message ... Eric wrote: They recommend 128MB? It does run OK on 128MB. I believe it does run on 64MB though. Of course 512MB is nicer, but so is 2GB. The more RAM you give it, the smoother it will run. If you do anything that uses much RAM, it will just use the swap file if it runs out. Just make sure you keep enough free HD space. Same goes for any OS. Win98 can run on 16MB, Vista can run on 1GB maybe even less. The more you get, the smoother they run. If you increase any one component past a certain point, you just shift the bottleneck. Any one piece can be the weakest link for performance (CPU, RAM, video speed, video RAM, BUS, HD...). Above a certain amount of RAM any additional RAM added to the machine is just a waste of money and it will not make the computer run any faster or smoother. Where that "magic" amount lies depends on what you do with your computer and what type of applications you run, if your computer is not paging then adding extra RAM will do nothing to make your computer run better, faster or smoother. Many XP users, I would say half or more of XP users, don't need much more than 512MB of RAM and other than those doing multimedia/AV editing or those running CAD/CAM and very large spreadsheets or other demanding programs few users ever need or use more than 1GB. Users who barely use 512MB will not see a bit of difference when adding additional RAM to their computers. We see occasional posts in the XP groups where users have increased RAM from 512MB or 768MB to 1GB and more and they disappointedly report no performance gains. The reason they see no gains is that they weren't using what they already had to work with. John Exactly, but there is no one "magic number". XP runs perfectly smooth with 128 MB of RAM for the average user who does very little. There are a number of bottlenecks. Adding more RAM will always make it smoother, if you're actually doing processing that uses RAM (ie image/video editing). 512MB is much more than needed if all you do is check email. It's also too much if your PC is 400MHz, or you do a lot of processing which has to do constant read/write to disk. For the average user, more RAM (at least above 512MB) will probably not be their best upgrade option, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a bad idea. I have 1 GB in this machine and Windows reports quite a bit less than half of physical memory available. To spend money wisely on upgrading, you'll want to start with the minimum RAM (16MB for Win98/ME, 128MB for XP, 1GB for Vista), then make sure the CPU is fast enough, then make sure the HD is big enough, then check the video speed/memory, then at least double the minimum RAM, make sure the monitor is big and clear enough, double the RAM again... Of course if you're on the web much the first and biggest bottleneck is web connection speed. The biggest baddest PC will always look pathetic on dialup. |
#8
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gotta say.. so long ME
"KB" wrote in message ..
Be sure that your system's compatible with XP. Valuable information can be found here = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316639 You'll especially find the Upgrade Advisor useful = http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...g/advisor.mspx I tried the XP Advisor.. it "stalls" at about the 10% point. No hdd activity... nothing. Meanwhile, I tested the various Linus offerings of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mepis. They behave really nice. I don't mind using Linux replacements of several winapps. And for those winapps that I can't stand to miss, I have another (4-yr old) XP machine. Having been a strong advocate of ME for many years, I've not been dissapointed with XP which took over a year to throw up an error message. Note that I didn't upgrade but bought a new system due to hardware incompatibility with the old system. Ahh.. That's the key: new machine. I bought a new machine 4 years ago that had XP installed too. Today, it still works fine. My main concern was the upgrade/conversion process from ME to XP. From my basic research, that upgrade path is not recommended. A clean install the better choice. |
#9
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gotta say.. so long ME
Just a modest follow-up. XP Advisor worked afterall. It just took a really
long time. When I ran the app, and when I assumed it "locked up", I took an hour dinner-break. When I got back, the finished Advisor report was on the screen. However..I've made my decision.. it's far better to avoid further unecessary expense and just move to Linux product. If I didn't need more resources and stability for real productivity, I'd probably be happy sticking it out with ME. But Linux seems to utilize the 768meg ram without complaint. So.. Linux is a far better choice, for me - and without all the added expense of XP and without all the uncertainty of conversion from a DOS-based Windows to a NT-based Windows. Oh.. and I'm not a gamer, so staying with ME (or any Windows product) is not important for me. "Ogg" wrote.. I tried the XP Advisor.. it "stalls" at about the 10% point. No hdd activity... nothing. Meanwhile, I tested the various Linus offerings of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mepis. They behave really nice. I don't mind using Linux replacements of several winapps. And for those winapps that I can't stand to miss, I have another (4-yr old) XP machine. |
#10
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gotta say.. so long ME
Just one more question before you leave, Ogg: Did you install Ubuntu (and I assume that's what you did) all by itself, or in combination with another OS? Harry. "Ogg" wrote in message ... Just a modest follow-up. XP Advisor worked afterall. It just took a really long time. When I ran the app, and when I assumed it "locked up", I took an hour dinner-break. When I got back, the finished Advisor report was on the screen. However..I've made my decision.. it's far better to avoid further unecessary expense and just move to Linux product. If I didn't need more resources and stability for real productivity, I'd probably be happy sticking it out with ME. But Linux seems to utilize the 768meg ram without complaint. So.. Linux is a far better choice, for me - and without all the added expense of XP and without all the uncertainty of conversion from a DOS-based Windows to a NT-based Windows. Oh.. and I'm not a gamer, so staying with ME (or any Windows product) is not important for me. "Ogg" wrote.. I tried the XP Advisor.. it "stalls" at about the 10% point. No hdd activity... nothing. Meanwhile, I tested the various Linus offerings of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mepis. They behave really nice. I don't mind using Linux replacements of several winapps. And for those winapps that I can't stand to miss, I have another (4-yr old) XP machine. |
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