How workable is Vista?

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I don't get what you are saying. Who builds laptops to order??? I know I can build a desktop and put any OS on it I want. But laptops almost always come with an MS OS and now that will be Vista. I think Dell has a few laptops with Linux, but they don't seem to be any cheaper and in fact are their higher priced machines. Who else sells good laptops with no OS, but *with* drivers for other OSs?

Reply to
rickman
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I think he is saying that his hard drives are partitioned into two drives, each bootable. When he wants to clone one partition, he boots form the other. To clone the entire hard drive takes two boots and two XXCOPY operations.

Am I mistaken?

Rick

Reply to
rickman

There are various virtualisation solutions that might make your life easier. is a DOS emulator that gives a much more complete DOS environment than a command prompt in windows. You could also try Virtual Box, which is a good virtualisation environment. If that doesn't work, qemu is a more complete (and slower) x86 emulator.

Reply to
David Brown

With all these jobs being outsourced around the world, Americans should be proud to support Vista - no where else could they help so many people stay usefully employed doing so little real work!

:-)

Reply to
David Brown

I've just had a look at the Dell website. Maybe it's different here in Norway, but the upgrade from Vista Business to XP Pro costs exactly 0 Norwegian kroner. (It costs a bit more to upgrade Vista Ultimate to XP Pro - but that's because you have the media and a license to downgrade to Ultimate later if you want.)

I suppose if you are comparing prices from a Vista Home version, it will cost more, as the Vista Business license costs more. But would you want the Home version on a business machine in the first place?

Reply to
David Brown

Why do you imagine that the drives are not completely bootable (they are competely normal hard drives and boot like any other hard drive) or that there can be any access between them (after you are done making the clones, one will be in a drawer powered down while the other is running on the PC.) And, of course, the actual customer data goes on after the clones are made, so no interaction or cross-access there either.

I don't see why you aren't happy.

Reply to
Guy Macon

Two comments:

First, making a sector by sector copy is a Bad Idea. Supposedly identical drives often have slightly different sizes, error mappings, etc. XXCopy does a perfect clone of the entire filesystem after the OS does a format, and thus you can restore to *any* drive that has enough room. If you are dead set on a sector copy, do both and make an XXCopy copy as well.

Second, a sector by sector copy doesn't accomplish the goal that you think it does. That outside-of-the-filesystem data is very likely to be erased when a user does a defrag, and thus the software vendors are not likely to store copy protection data there. The usual places (hidden files, diagnostic track, boot record), XXCopy handles fine. Also, a sector by sector copy doesn't clone everything. Many copy protection schemes use the hard drive serial number (HDSN), S.M.A.R.T. data, Firmware Revision number, etc. No cloning method copies all of those.

With the obvious exceptions (making the clone after the drive is trashed, making the clone after you are infected, making the clone and thus putting the same app that later crashes and burns the same way on both drives), all of which are avoided by cloning a fresh OS install and from then on only working with one drive at a time, Yes. Using XXCopy to make a clone accomplishes the above. The drive siiting in the fire safe powered-down cannot be destroyed by anything running on the PC in the other room.

BTW, if you want a "belt and suspenders" solution, make one clone with XXCopy, another to another drive with Nortom Ghost, then use TrueImage to make a restorable backup to recordable DVDs. This will make it so that no two hardware or software faiures can hose all of your data. The TrueImage DVD copy will come in very handy if your PC ever has a hardware failure that makes it into a disk drive destroyer...

I personally use three redundant computers, and backup my customer data to multiple SD cards and USB flash drives. This makes it so that I can go longer between cloning my three main OSs (SlackWare Linux, Windows XP, QNX).

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Reply to
Guy Macon

And as someone else remarked, you can replace word processor Mark I, Mod 0 (wood pencil and paper) with a more expensive word processor. Once you get the more expensive computer you can then hammer all your work to fit a word process and/or Web browser when all you need is a simple text editor.

Microsoft has even extended their reach for wasting resources to the Internet by making it difficult to do email in a simple text form. You now get email with embedded HTML so that the messages are at least 4 times larger than necessary. There goes the Internet bandwidth...

Reply to
Everett M. Greene

Nope. You are correct.

BTW, another way would be to have a third disk that boots an OS and then clones the other two. I use the two-partition method so that XXCopy can do the cloning over ethernet between redundant computers.

Reply to
Guy Macon

The topper was a Word file I got from a client recently. About a dozen pages. 15 megabytes!

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Reply to
Joerg

Business costs more.

Why not?

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Reply to
Joerg

this:

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The little shop where we bought most of the PCs and laptops did. You went there, they poured you a coffee and then you'd sit down with the tech guru and piece together the machine. He used to know which drivers were available in which OS and which ones weren't.

Dell always gave me options. Now Linux won't work for me because I need to run EE software. But I usually opted for the oldest Windows they could fit onto the machine, for example Win2k after XP came out. No problem. However, that was always through their business sales, no idea how it is in the consumer section.

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Reply to
Joerg

Actually, I use a straight boot to a real DOS. Win98SE permits me to set up a CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT with a menu system that lets me make a choice at boot time (or, I can just always go straight to the pure DOS environment and, if I please, type WIN to go into Windows.)

However, since I set up separate disks for each project/client it is usually the case that I either need some Windows environment or some Linux environment or some DOS environment ... but more or less rarely some combo of them. If I'm developing, using a crossdevelopment tool that needs to run under Win2000 or later, for example, then I need Win2000 or WinXP for the tools I use. I don't need the DOS box, for the most part, at times like that. If I'm developing using tools that were originally designed to run with DOS, then I just configure a DOS boot disk and use it. The caveat there is that there are some ways of doing things under Windows in Win98SE that can ease some of the development under DOS, so I like a split boot situation there (side by side code comparison programs are an example of such a tool I like to have handy even when developing using DOS tools.)

I recently read something here about that and I'm looking into it. Not sure, yet, if it will actually help me though. My problem is about not depending on Microsoft to enable the operating system on a permanent basis when I set up a new disk drive. I not only have complete control over that for Win98SE (and earlier Windows), but Microsoft's licensing for those earlier operating systems clearly allows me to use my license in exactly the way I need to do it. So I am comforming, as well, which is where I like to be. In their later operating system environment licensing, I'm far far less sure from a close reading of the EULA and in any case they had appeared to require me to call to get a new authorization -- especially given the way I go through disks -- and trying to explain each and every time to some new person is something I definitely do NOT intend doing.

With Vista, though, I'm finished with them. The hardware requirements and the special care they've taken with DRM and protecting a few large company interests at my expense (literally speaking) is the last straw for me. I don't need nor do I care about movies, audio, songs, etc. on my working machines. It has nothing to do with what I'm about. And yet I must pay heavily in excess cycles, memory, and specialized hardware just because some companies are having problems with some people and what they consider to be the off chance that I might have a random thought about being a momentary thief. Add to that, my own needs for my model of doing work and their inattention to those needs (the widening gap between their interests and mine) and I cannot see being the only one between us who is working to bridge the gap, any longer.

Well, I need as close as possible, not emulation. I don't use the client's project disk for random interests of mine. And it isn't hard to have with real DOS. I keep a supply of older machines on the shelf, too.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Interesting discussion for me. I've got a learning curve to conquer, now. Thanks.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Not a good reason. Last sunday on my 10+ years linux server the fan broke down. I heard it. Replaced it with an extra fan supplied with a case I bought a year ago. The broken fan reads 1994. I'm going to buy a roller bearing first class fan, but for the moment I'm fine.

Fan replacement is a pretty trivial exercise.

Nice.

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Reply to
Albert van der Horst

There's a few more issues with this box. The power supply doesn't always start. Ok, that will be one resistor and maybe one cap. But occasionally it let off an evil hiss. The box contains 64MB of RAM and AFAIK can only take a grand total of 128MB. The additional RAM would probably have to be found in a museum.

If I have some free time I'll try it. I hate throwing away stuff. Not from a financial POV but because of the environment. I just know that almost nothing from that PC would really be recycled in a way that makes much sense.

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Reply to
Joerg

... snip ...

I get a little marker of the following type:

Part 1.1 Type: Plain Text (text/plain) Encoding: quoted-printable

which I then enquote and return to the sender. There is much less HTML in these newsgroups, and in my email correspondents, than there used to be. Even my daughters use plain text.

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Reply to
CBFalconer

... snip ...

At that size I daresay it included some editing, and you could reverse that at will. If so, I can think of ways to discourage them from such practices.

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Reply to
CBFalconer

Compare also the cost, size, coding and build time to do

printf( "Hello World\n");

Let alone the cost of the tools (and getting certificates so it can run!)

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Reply to
Paul Carpenter

My point is that you should keep the older machines and the individual disks - those are your reserves, and your absolute references. But you do the real work using images of those disks as virtual machines. That would avoid all risk of wear and tear on the irreplaceable old parts, and give you a much safer backup system (just copy the images as often as needed).

The more sophisticated virtual machines like Virtual Box are easy to use, and easy to integrate with the host (things like screen resizing, mouse integration, networking, etc.), and support a range of guest operating systems, but don't cover all possibilities. Qemu works at a lower level of emulation, and is slower and less integrated, but will work with pretty much any guest OS.

Reply to
David Brown

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