Is It Time To Stop Using Windows XP?

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:38:41 -0500, put finger to
keyboard and composed:

For some reason, Foxit used to work fine for me, in Win98se. Lately,
it seems to crash quite often when I load large PDF files.

Foxit is resource hungry.

You can watch the resources disappear with RSRCMTR.EXE which ships
with Win98SE.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

wrote:
On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:38:51 -0300, Shadow wrote:

I used win98SE on my wife's PC until a couple of months ago.
Then I needed to install a new DVD drive and started getting crashes.
So I "upgraded".
Win98SE was just as efficient and faster than XP. But I had to
switch because of the trouble it took to find adequate drivers. Ralink
does not even link drivers for win98 anymore, probably true for other
manufacturers.
[]'s

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

The successors to XP are too bloated for my taste.

On top of that, the XP installation was formatted with NTFS, and if I
can not access my data from dos,

Not really. You can, with some utilities like NTFS4DOS, and the like.

That NTFS format is a guarantee to losing all important data.

Not so. In truth, NTFS is a more robust file format with its journaling.

But I guess all factory installations of XP come with that
crappy format.

You're a few years behind the times. It's gone, and is "replaced" now with
Windows 7 (thanks, but no thanks). At least XP wasn't as bloated as all
its successors. One thing I do love about XP is the almost complete
absence of blue screens, in comparison to Win 98. It's been a LONG time
since I've gotten a blue screen on XP - in stark contrast to Win 9x

You might be able to still find Windows 3.1, if you're interested. :-)

Bill in Co wrote:

That NTFS format is a guarantee to losing all important data.

Not so. In truth, NTFS is a more robust file format with its
journaling.

NTFS is not "more robust" compared to FAT32.

There are passive and active components to file systems.

The most simple of file systems have no active component. There is
really no active component to FAT32. When a file needs to be written,
it's target sector locations are computed and the data is handed off to
the hard drive.

With NTFS, there are active processes that are always "supervising" the
state or condition of open files (yes, journalling is one such process).

FAT32 could have journalling and it would still be FAT32.

When a write operation happens in NTFS, and the operation does not
complete properly, journalling rolls back the state of the file to that
of it's last known good state. Any data that may actually have been
written to the file during the so-called failed write operation is
lost. And actually, much more data can be lost depending on the
write-buffer settings.

Example: I have an NT-4 web server running IIS. It creates daily logs
of who is surfing to it and what pages they are requesting. When that
server unexpectedly loses power, I can expect that not only will I lose
the contents of the currently-opened log file, I will also lose the
contents of the previous 14 days log files. Put that into your
NTFS-is-robust pipe and smoke it.

When orphaned sectors are created in FAT32, there is no supervisory
process that corrects them in real-time. The orphaned sectors simply
remain on the drive and are dealt with when (or if) the user runs
scandisk (or scandisk is run automatically at the next system bootup).

NTFS performs the eqivalent of scandisk every time an NT-based system is
started, and it removes orphaned sectors in real time, and because these
operations are transparent, the user is left with the impression that
orphaned sectors are never created under NTFS, giving the user the
impression that NTFS is more robust. The reality is that NTFS simply
makes it seem that way be not giving the user the ability to rescue data
from orphaned sectors - it simply wipes them away.

NTFS was created and given certain abilities for these reasons:

1) microsoft needed a file system that contained permission structures
that would allow various levels of access to individual files. Home and
soho users don't really need that ability, but they're stuck with it
because NT and it's derivatives are designed first and formost for
corporate / enterprise use.

2) NT and it's derivatives (2k, XP, etc) when used as servers requires a
file system that can handle multiple users accessing the same file, and
some files can be rather large (larger than 4 gb). NTFS was designed
with this ability in mind. Again, home and soho users don't need this.

3) hard drives of the early 1990's to the early 2000's had limited
on-board write buffers and limited or no ability to perform internal
bad-sector re-mapping, so the NTFS was given journalling capability and
bad-sector remapping capability, neither of which is needed today given
the built-in error handling capability of drives made during the past 7
or 8 years.

NTFS is proprietary and is not fully, publically documented. The
command and control structures of NTFS is distributed throughout the
drive space, making it hard to piece together if it has been corrupted.
FAT32's command and control structures are concentrated in specific
sectors of the drive, making recovery easier because file data is not
mixed in with those control structures. FAT32 is fully documented, and
there exists more software (free and paid) that can recover FAT32
drives.

One thing I do love about XP is the almost complete
absence of blue screens, in comparison to Win 98.

Windows 98 got a bad rap early in it's life because computers at the
time had very pathetic hardware. AGP was a new video bus format, and
there were lots of buggy drivers and even AGP hardware during the years
1998 - 2002. The amount of memory that systems had back then was a joke
(32 mb, 64 mb if you were lucky). Blue screens were common.

But if you are running 98 on at least a P-3 system with 256 mb of ram
and a motherboard made after 2002 (or ideally, a P-4 system with 512 mb
ram and a motherboard made after 2003) then you will see hardly any blue
screens.

The frequency with which you see a blue-screen under win-98 is, in my
experience, a function of the age of the system hardware and the amount
of installed memory - NOT anything inherent in the code of the OS
itself.

It's been a LONG time since I've gotten a blue screen on XP
- in stark contrast to Win 9x

I don't know about you, but I run 98 daily at work and at home. I can't
remember the last time I got a blue screen on win-98.

If you actually do run win-98 on a frequent basis today, then tell us
something about the hardware it's installed on. What is the CPU? What
is the vintage of the motherboard and video card? How much installed
ram?

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:38:41 -0500, wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:21:08 -0400, 98 Guy wrote:

I have yet to come across a pdf file that Acrobat Reader 6 can't open.

And I have yet to find a pdf exploit that FUNCTIONS PROPERLY on a win-98
system when opened with Acrobat Reader 6.

Besides - there is always Foxit and other third-party readers.

For some reason, Foxit used to work fine for me, in Win98se. Lately,
it seems to crash quite often when I load large PDF files. I dont
recall the version number, but I have the last version of Foxit that
will run in Win98.

I have not installed Acrobat reader in many years. I never liked its
slowness and bloat. Foxit used to work flawlessly, but it seems there
is a new generation of PDF files that is flawed in the sense that it
crashes Foxit. I even removed Foxit, and went back the earlier
version I had used for years, but that one crashes too. It often will
lock up my entire system. I have no other software that causes Win98
to crash. IE was always my biggest source of crashes in Win98, but I
no longer use IE at all, in fact I renamed the IEXPLORE.EXE file to
IEXPLORE.EX_. I did that over a year ago when I got fed up with IE
loading when I thought it was not set to the default browser. This
change solved that problem. I never liked IE anyhow. Now I use
Firefox and K-Meleon. Both work well, K-Meleon is faster and more
similar to IE except very stable. My entire Win98 setup is extremely
stable, until I load those damn PDF files.

So go for Acrobat 6, until....

Anything over 6.1 gave me grief.

RL

On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:59:32 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:22:21 -0500, legg wrote:

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:38:41 -0500, wrote:

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:21:08 -0400, 98 Guy wrote:

I have yet to come across a pdf file that Acrobat Reader 6 can't open.

And I have yet to find a pdf exploit that FUNCTIONS PROPERLY on a win-98
system when opened with Acrobat Reader 6.

Besides - there is always Foxit and other third-party readers.

For some reason, Foxit used to work fine for me, in Win98se. Lately,
it seems to crash quite often when I load large PDF files. I dont
recall the version number, but I have the last version of Foxit that
will run in Win98.

I have not installed Acrobat reader in many years. I never liked its
slowness and bloat. Foxit used to work flawlessly, but it seems there
is a new generation of PDF files that is flawed in the sense that it
crashes Foxit. I even removed Foxit, and went back the earlier
version I had used for years, but that one crashes too. It often will
lock up my entire system. I have no other software that causes Win98
to crash. IE was always my biggest source of crashes in Win98, but I
no longer use IE at all, in fact I renamed the IEXPLORE.EXE file to
IEXPLORE.EX_. I did that over a year ago when I got fed up with IE
loading when I thought it was not set to the default browser. This
change solved that problem. I never liked IE anyhow. Now I use
Firefox and K-Meleon. Both work well, K-Meleon is faster and more
similar to IE except very stable. My entire Win98 setup is extremely
stable, until I load those damn PDF files.

So go for Acrobat 6, until....

Anything over 6.1 gave me grief.

RL

So there are no other alternatives? You'd think as popular as PDF
files are, there would be more readers. Foxit used to be great, but
not anymore. I hated Acrobat, I almost hate to install it again. I
recall it was a major bitch to get rid of it.

Not really popular, but pervasive, perverted and strangled by their
claim-jumping IP 'owners'.

Nowadays, disc file size is seldom an issue, and 500Mb of ram
commonplace - making sure that it doesn't run at start-up or as a
background process renders it largely harmless, in-situ.

As long as you don't pay them money, you're doing about as much as you
honestly can to demonstrate your stand on this issue. If their
published documents become increasingly unreadable or buggy, they lose
- you don't.

RL

98 Guy wrote in :

wrote:

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.

You can install XP and Win-2k on a FAT-32 formatted drive. If you
install DOS first (like DOS 7.1) then you can have a dual-boot DOS/XP
system. I've build a few systems by doing that.

I've done it for basically the same reasons - I can access the all files
from DOS, and the system runs faster because of the lack of NTFS
98 Guy:

I've done it for basically the same reasons - I
can access the all files from DOS, and the system
runs faster because of the lack of NTFS overhead.
And yes, your data is actually safer and more
recoverable under FAT32 vs NTFS.

This is interesting. Could you please provide refer-
ences to prove these facts about FAT32 vs NTFS?

--
Anton Shepelev

Sorry for quoting the post by .

"If you actually do run win-98 on a frequent basis today, then tell us
something about the hardware it's installed on. What is the CPU? What
is the vintage of the motherboard and video card? How much installed
ram?"

CPU: 64-bit AMD Phenom X3 (I run 32-bit 98/2K and 64-bit Mandriva on it,) 3GHz
Motherboard: mid-2008 MSI
Video "card": the built-in AGP-esque chipset
RAM: 2 gigs
Hard drive: 750GB Seagate SATA drive
Floppy drives: 1.44MB 3.5" Mitsumi; 1.2MB 5.25" Mitsumi D509V3 (salvaged from an
old Frankenstine piece-of-junk computer I built in the '90s)
CD drives: 2007 TSST/Toshiba Samsung SH-S202N (halfway decent IDE multiformat
CDVD recorder)
2009 Sony Blue Ray/CDVD recorder SATA drive that I snagged for $20 at an estate
sale earlier this year

98 just screams on this machine, despite that it's a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit chip.
I can bring it up 98 on it and it'll be ready in about 10 seconds flat (compared
to the 25 it took my previous 2.4 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM!) I think you can
figger out what I run my Audacity on.

2KSP4 is a little sluggish, but usable. I mainly only have it so I can run
Andlinux, because Ardour runs like utter crap on my Mandriva. Andlinux runs in a
6GB NTFS partition, whilst everything else is FAT32 (save for Mandriva, which is
on a separate EXT3 partition.)

Interestingly, some programmes in 2000 (like 7-Zip and Andlinux) see the
triple-core architecture of the Phenom as being three seperate CPUs, and can
utilise it as such.

--
MotoFox
Former superstar of the Muzak Forums, 2003-2009
Do not staple, fold, spindle or mutilate.
If ingested, do not induce vomiting.

NTFS see Fat
But Fat see no NTFS

So if you running win 98 and you need a file off win 2000 that is in FTFS
you can not have it!
But on the older hand FTFS see all know all!

so make all Fat if you need to Share files!

"MyNews" wrote:

NTFS see Fat
But Fat see no NTFS

Not exactly. Neither file system sees anything but its own files.
Operating systems that can use NTFS can also use FAT. Not all
operating systems that can use FAT can use NTFS.

In particular the NT series of systems - NT, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7 -
can use both file systems. the Win9x systems can use FAT but not NTFS.

--
Tim Slattery

http://members.cox.net/slatteryt