I managed to install Win2K over the crap that came on my Sony Vaio, but it took me MONTHS of scrounging to get all the power control and video features working correctly.
But this past summer I bought a tower "bare", formatted and installed Win2K... worked "just ducky".
...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
Linux might very well be getting worse. The different distros all have their own way of doing things, so no apps work the same across all of them. They customize the vanilla apps such as OpenOffice and Mozilla to integrate with their desktop and config tools, so you can't upgrade the apps with drop in packages direct from the originating projects.
I am having so many problems with the highly regarded Suse 9.1 (after about a month of tinkering just to get it to the point of being able to do most of my work) that I'm really getting fed up. Each version gets worse, in direct proportion to how much more "smart" it tries to be. I am considering going back to Slackware with which I started 9 years ago, but I can't afford another 1-2 months of tinkering to get it all set up. And no matter what I do, more and more of the web sites that I simply must use to run my life, have show stopping quirks or issues unless IE is used. Or even more depressingly, they work with an alternative browser such as Firefox on Windows, but not on Linux.
The PC OS and office software industry is a horrible mess, and there's no relief in sight. Linux was a reaction to this brokenness. But it isn't providing ordinary users with an escape path, only a narrow group of highly technically skilled developers/users. I am becoming convinced that Linux will never become the solution to the Microsoft problem, for reasons the Linux community will never ever be able to admit.
If we had the kind of competition in the software industry as we have say, between AMD and Intel, then we might really have something worthwhile. Two or more 99.9% compatible PC OSes trying to one-up each other all the time on straightforwardness and stability.
Oh what a dream.
At this point I would pay serious personal money, say $500-$600 for a PC OS that was very solid, with the flexibility and features that I like about Linux, and with the vast pool of applications and hardware available for Windows. But it doesn't exist. And the Mac hardware is way too expensive, though it's a possible contender for the first criterion, except for the applications.
Good day!
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Christopher R. Carlen
So far, I've found the best Windows XP troubleshooting tool to be my old Windows 2000 CD. Whenever XP does something I don't like, I reformat it and install Windows 2000 instead.
I ran 98 up until a month ago, when my new Dells arrived (one for work, one for home) and I made the cutover to XP; I have almost recovered from the experience. 98 was OK, but crashed a lot for me and had to be rebooted daily to be reliable. It did run DOS apps well, including ones that did real, direct I/O.
Each new Dell has 2 identical hard drives. I bought TrueImage to clone the drives; one master setup on one pc gets cloned to all three other drives. I wanted to also image the pristine setup to DVDs, which TrueImage is supposed to do, too, but that doesn't work. So I ordered two more identical hard drives and I'll image onto them, pull, and stash them in storage for when something breaks.
I have always used IBM's OS/2. It has morphed over into what they now call eComstation. Many figure its dead, but that is far from the truth. It is still very viable, and has all the web capability and office stuff, lots of hardware support, and software updates, other than the kernel, come along when needed. Its just a lot of work to keep it up, and after 14 years, I finally had to let it go. That led me to Linux, and the same conclusion you have reported. Splintered, and unusable in many ways. Now I am stuck in Windows2K. XP is not an option, now, or ever.
This is why I was one reason I could stay with OS/2 for so long. The mozilla/firefox stuff is well cared for, and can keep up with most, but trully, not all sites.
Remember that with the preference bar add-on, or manual text editing, you can spoof the browser type and most websites will then give you what you want. I have been on a lot of sites that say "no go without IE," I change the broswer ID to report itself as WinXP IE, and bingo, I am in and using all the features. There are not that many sights that use anything more than that browser ID to restrict users. Not all, but most can be spoofed.
The Linux community has a bigger ego that even bill gates, and it is not possible to get them to see that a group effort, towards a killer desktop/maintenance scheme would walk all over a lot of M$'s installs, but don't wait up. As you said, its getting worse, not better. Whatever you do, don't talk about this issue with the hard cores :-)
Its old, its over, but OS/2 was that OS, but gates blackmailed and extorted IBM into shutting it down. In the trial it came out pretty clear that he threatened to withhold, or increase to exorbitant amounts, licenses of windows for IBMs business customers, and in the end, they bent over for him, to please their own stockholders. We had a competition, briefly, a long time ago, then a trial, a guilty verdict, and then...... nothing :-)
The hardware support you seek would be a bit thin, but honestly, OS/2 can do that in many ways. Certainly it is better equipped and easier to use than Linux, but I know many will laff, and not bother, and that's okay. Even to this day, the company that is handling the maintenance of OS/2, having bought that right from IBM, runs in fear of M$, as everytime the step into the light with their product, M$ turns the machine loose on them, and articles fly, innuendo pervades, and the same stuff happens again, and occured in the mid to late 90's. bill still seems a bit afraid of OS/2, even tho it has died a thousand deaths
Just an opinion, because you lamented the lack of a reliable OS when its possible that there is one you could utilize. Never said it was all inclusive with hardware, but I was always able to find a way to "get there from here"
Exactly. Opera is set to do this by default of course. Opera used to have problems with some sites years ago, but thats all long fixed. Now I dont know of any site it cant do - if they exist, theyre rare.
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Yup. I keep dreaming of a big company to rewite a windows clone from the ground up, only a) making it work, b) also putting in better ways of doing things, as well as the current Win ones, so that new software can start to work better on it than on Win, c) including a fast track miniOS, a little like DOS, enabling parts of apps to run at top speed bypassing the main OS, d) adding things that make it easier for users, such as extra text comments with question boxes, 2 help explanations for every one now, better help question trees, info on recommended software, drivers, a tickbox to switch off all the silly sounds, thorough system hardware test routines, and so on.
But that would just be too large and too expensive a job. No-ones got enough money over enough time. If they ever do, MS is dead.
Seems to me there is little understanding there of why nearly everyone uses win and so on, all the things Gates learnt and taught us so clearly. Also no leadership, which seems to me to be vital for any competitive product to win. In short, Linuxers may be able to code, but without the lessons that Gates brought to the scene, it'll never happen. For all his icky characteristics he is still a successsful genius, and only a fool ignores his various lessons.
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Is that still possible? Playing MS type games would make it very difficult now, things are quite different now to the pre-win days.
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the solution I see there is 2 or more PCs and an assortment of OSes. Not ideal, but the way it seems to be.
I'm happy to not use xp yet, but it seems inevitable as more and more is written specifically for XP, and nothing else.
Because all that will do is give me reliable storage of a damaged OS. It's not so much disk failures I'm concerned about, it's os corruption and loss of files. If I back up my project and email and datasheet files often to DVDs, and I have a configured baseline OS I can reinstall, I can get back on line fast after any disaster. If I have to reinstall Windows and all my apps, and reconfigure all the settings and stuff, it would take a week or two.
I sure wish I could image the hard drive to a DVD or two. TrueImage bombs... anybody know of something that works?
The old adage..if it ain't broke, don't fix it applies to operating systems! I still use W98,1st,rock stable,no blue screens of death,etc. I finally figured out to NOT buy the 'latest and greatest' PC as long as this one does what I want, i don't care about the rest of the world. I'm a 2 finger typer and need an ISA slot for my eprom burner. The $50 scanner (USB 1) works fine too. Nice thing about W98 is that I have my D drive as a clone so IF C goes 'funny' I can pull D out and slide it in C's slide mount. Simple,easy, the way it should be. Now if I could only figure out why the 'screen saver display timer' goes funny some days, I'd be real happy. XP = Xtra Problems
Because mirroring only protects against hard drive failure, and how many times does that really happen? Having a backup is much preferred with windwoes because it can seldom be repaired, requiring the install all over again.
formatting link
is a pretty nice program for making image files, and cloning drives and partitions. Once your stuff is all installed, and virus/adware free, make a compressed image and store it on another drive, or even had dfsee chop it into CD sizes, and then when things vomit all over itself, as it most certainly will, just blow it off, and restore the image or clone.
There are ways to get around windwoes problems, but it takes a bit of a dance :-)
Lindows ain't too bad, if you buy the subscription, and have a broadband connection to get all the apps for it. Just like with any linux, you have to create a new user once its installed, or you are root, and as you say, insecure as can be.
They gave it away for a while, a few months back, I tried it, and its no better, no worse than most other distros. It is a bit nicer, having some names make sense, and utilities that we all get used to having are right there, rather than having to be dug up, and put on the menu bar by hand.
Its not always an invalid page. Often the idiot programmer looks for IE, and if its not IE, he/she simply refuses to show pages, offer links, etc.
There is crappy code (boy is there every!) and there are programmers who are twelve years old and only know how to use FrontPage. There are more of the latter, than the former, although they are certainly intertwined.....
My bank won't let me in with Mozilla/Firefox in OS/2 or Linux, so when I need to use it, I just set it to IE, and everything is there. Ebay often displays pages better when it thinks I am a microsoft users. Its a mess for sure but it doesn't help having wet-behind-the-ear boneheads setting up the pages, and locking people out. I have found more than a few occasions, that contacting sales or other upper management folks for most corporations, and explaining the issue of locking out customers, usually gets someone a kick in the butt, and not long after, the web site is open to all.
Most officers in the company have no idea that their front doors are locked to a lot of customers, and they respond quite positively to gentle prodding.
stable and secure are two different things. Linspire would likely be as stable as any Linux distro, but generally speaking, is stability an issue anymore with XP and 2000, on the large scale that is was with Win9*?
I don't do XP, but win2000 is a rock, and when an app does go over the edge, the task manager always seems to come up, and let me kill it.
Not that I am touting M$, by any means. Linux, and that old OS/2 thing make it look like a tinker toy in that department.
Have you ever seen or tried Crossover Office from codeweavers.com?
I used it a few times and it was remarkably decent at running a lot of windows apps. photoshop, quicken, and most things I use. Its just a well developed and supported app using wine as the core. The only problem was my machine didn't have the CPU or RAM to get along smoothly. I would think a high end PC would make good use of it. They have a 30 day demo on their web site.
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