Yes it IS essential. The level of owners of newer hardware has grown, so the number that need to make that new purchase is lower, but remains nonetheless. That is part of the reason why W7 will 'fit' better with today's crop of machine owners. You 'old dog' mentality dipshit may know a lot about the electrons toggling back and forth in these folks' machines, but you sure do not know much about actually keeping up with the industry you claim to have such a good understanding of with your own hardware collection.
You dopes need to finally realize that you will NOT be able to run these modern OSes on your 6 year old crap hardware.
So your bent brain fails to see the bigger picture... again.
OS/2 failed because of Bill Gates' move to deny IBM the essential core code to make OS/2 Win32 and beyond compatible, which was the original agreement they had. They did the same thing to DesqViewX essentially. Billy doesn't play well with others.
That is the ONLY reason OS/2 failed. I know, as I was studying to become an OS/2 certified engineer at the time.
And it didn't fail at all in industry, only as a consumer product. It continued to get used... by ALL banks, all over the world, for several years after it was removed from the consumer channel.
In fact, it was not until late into the Win 2000 release, after they got win 2000 server software going, that the banks abandoned OS/2 for windows based solutions.
Any machine that will run Vista adequately will run Win 7. There are lots of new Vista capable machines in corporations with the "optional" XP downgrade installed. They might buy into Win 7 if it looks any good, but they are never going to buy new hardware when the Vista boxes are already up to the job.
Stop drooling you halfwit. I still own one box that is 6 years old for regression testing on a much slower machine. My main box is quad core.
The oldest box gets used only very occasionally.
What are you talking about? I was merely pointing out that Win 7 can be installed on any hardware that is capable of running Vista. Even today corporates are still specifying XP downgrades installed on new (Vista capable) kit because they intend to skip to Win7.
There are enough annoying problems with Vista that I would not use it unless I had to. The animations are pretty but pointless. Drivers for various useful kit are notable for their absence.
There was more to it than that. It was set on a bad track from the start and Gates could see that (requiring backwards compatibility with the 286 caused much trouble). Then IBM conflated their attempted PS/2 MCA hardware lock-in architecture launch with OS/2. It was a total disaster. The OS was late and corporates walked away in droves. None of us wanted to be trapped in another IBM proprietary architecture. It was the best free marketting campaign for Compaq and Dell PCs ever. It forced the clone makers to cooperate against the evil Big Blue and EISA was the result.
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I was an OS/2 developer. OS/2 failed because it didn't sell well. Over priced and under promoted. IBM were asleep at the wheel and let Win3 gain too much popularity.
It was used in industrial applications until quite a bit later than that
- basically until the kit wore out. I did the odd consultancy job for Y2k compliance on OS/2. The funny thing was that the Fixpack side effects caused more problems than the Y2k bug!
I guess they liked the nice friendly MickeySoft BSODs. OS/2 systems would run for weeks on end without any kind of glitch - too boring.
OS/2 was way ahead of its time. But like Betamax the technical quality is worth nothing if you cannot persuade the punters to buy it.
Agreed, but the "bloat" of Microsoft OSes has arguably caused the price of RAM (per bit) and CPUs (per cycle) to drop much faster than they otherwise would have. Even if you could run Windows XP with, say, 64MB of RAM and an 800MHz CPU comfortably, it seems unlikely that the cost of the typical PC in real dollars today would really be that much different than what it it... yet for the people who will never have enough CPU cycles or memory, being able to buy gigabyte memory sticks for ~$10, terabyte hard drives and 3GHz dual-core CPUs for ~$100 each is a dream come true.
This affects the whole PC. In 1990 I paid well north of $5k for a (back then) very powerful machine. Sans monitor, that was another $2k for a
14-incher with a really good CRT in there. For someone who just started a consulting business that was a major but necessary expense.
My last one cost about $550 with RAM stuffed in there up to the teeth, dual-core, tons of HD space, sans monitor. The expense barely showed up on the radar screen.
But with DOS my 1990 PC was sometimes faster ...
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
You could, but it'd be a bad idea. W2K isn't very happy with less than about 256M of RAM. However, you can run Linux on 1/2 to 1/4 of that, fairly happily.
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Well, okay, it'll work, but it'll thrash horribly, & it'll take half an hour to open a Word document.
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Ditto. Which is just as well, as XP keeps on wanting to D/L & install SP3, even though it's already installed...
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Yet Compaq forced their PC owners to buy proprietary memory modules, etc. Oooops... I snuck that in one line too early. :-)
Dell also had "features" that tied the owner to Dell specific "upgrades".
I have an EISA 486 "screamer". It does. Shame that they tied it to the ISA bus speed, one of those "286 backward compatible elements" you were talking about.
When you consider the amount of hardware forcibly scrapped due to the whims of OS 'development', and the manpower wasted in deployment and maintenance, there is no real saving, only an incrementally mounting cost of participation in this farce.
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Perhaps. I agree there are downsides, but whether or not they outweigh the upsides is pretty much impossible to determine objectively, because it has to take into account so many details such as, "What's the worth of having a guy who used to be a farmer in rural China now working in a chip factory?" "How much environmental harm are we doing from cranking out PCs, cell phones, big screen TVs, etc. so fast?"
The cost of participation, if anything, has become lower over time -- a $500 new PC today will last the next 3 years if you're just using it for basic office tasks, web browsing, etc. Indeed, my observation has been that the replacement cycle time for "high tech" items such as cell phones, TVs, computers, etc. has become so short (often no more than 1-3 years) not so much because the old widgets are truly unusable anymore, but because the new ones are cheap enough that even though they only add a few incremental features, people will bite. (Although I also think that many people get new PCs because the old one is slow not so much because it's underpowered, but because they've installed so much junkware it crawls!)
The average price of utilities per month does seem to have gone up though... up until the '80s or so, you had water, sewer, gas, power, and phone. These days you usually also have at least a cell phone, Internet access, cable/satellite TV... and it seems that garbage pickup is also now more likely to be a separate charge. For many people, that's often $100+ more per month, all told.
The development of the worseless toys is the moving force of the technical progress of today. It also keeps many people busy. The only alternative known is the war and the war effort. So the farce is not really that bad and wasteful compared to some other possibilities.
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
WRT Vista, Texas has already decided that they aren't going to continue on:
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So have I :-))
Computing has become cheaper, to the point where it is not really a major business expense anymore. But the problems (and costs) creep in from the other end: At least once a week I have to fix something on my wife's PC so she can use email and such. For non-tech people it has become too freaking complicated. Back when we had CompuServe email via a DOS program I didn't have to do that once, in several years.
Much more. The "oh so necessary" extras in our neighborhood usually tally up like this, per month:
$50 cell, per person. $80 for cable TV. $10 for NetFlix. $50 gym membership (and many never go). $150 for the daily Starbuck fix. $200 because bringing in lunch sandwiches it "out". $400 car payments since the ash tray was full in the old one.
Many of those people are living paycheck to paycheck, carry a staggering credit card debt and their homes are mortgaged up to wazoo. I simply fail to understand it.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
With Vista I concur there's no need to upgrade -- nothing there that's worth the asking price, IMO. Take the money you would have spent on Vista and purchase something else or donate it to your favorite charity or something.
Of course, if you buy a new PC, these days the vast majority are going to come with Vista. Hopefully you'll at least have an XP "downgrade" option...
I think this is why many people have gone to web-based e-mail: No POP3 or IMAP settings in a mail client needed -- one less program that might go awry.
What tends to break on you wife's machine?
Unfortunately there's a bit of a stigma against living frugally... even even it's by choice.
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