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Termyn8or -> RE: Vista, what other wonders have I yet to find? (12/19/2007 12:34:01 PM)
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I don't think you can get XP Pro for fifty bucks.
I am a 98 Man, but now I have XP Pro Corporate edition. I had no choice because the router and modem companies no longer support 98 and I lost the disk. They walked me through a manual setup a while back but just would not do it again. After a few weeks of running MEPIS Linux off the CD I couln't stand it anymore.
With 98SE I am a guru, with XP I am a babe in the woods.
But I find it interesting that some retailers actually offer a downgrade to XP. Kinda wonder how many people take them up on it.
Just checked eBay, looks like about $150 for a copy of Pro. I see a few for like $130-140 and they have a bunch of bids on them.
Strange though, that Microshaft gave up on the idea of backward compatability. At least they paid attention to that in XP. When I first installed it I looked around for every old ass program I could find to see if it runs. Cybergirl Pinball runs, in DOS or whatever they call it now. Harvard Graphics 1.0 runs fine. I mean a 1.0 runs ? Wow. While I didn't have to use it, I am pleased that XP has this compatability mode, you can tell it to run a program in virtual 98, 95, 3.1 or DOS.
The reason that Microshaft has abandoned reverse compatability is that software and hardware manufacturers have a symbiotic relationship. Software forces you to buy hardware and vice versa. They are in cahootz, but it is not a conspiracy, it is simply some people working together to get as rich as possible.
The only thing I do not like about Pro is that it will not migrate. If your mobo fries you will have to reinstall it. Home edition is even worse, too many hardware changes and you must reregister it. My 98SE has been migrated, and I learned how to do that in control panel, deleting things, then rebooting and then comes the new hardware wizard. You throw a harddrive with XP, even Pro on it into a different machine it just sits there with it's thumb up it's ass.
There are still a few things that do get a rise out of me about XP though. First of all it is surprisingly fast on this old 433 Celeron with a whopping 160MB RAM. I thought sure it would be slower than 98SE was, but it's not. Boot time is impressive, but I think they cheat. I think what XP does is dump the contents of the RAM to the disk and after a quick scan for new hardware, just reloads the RAM on reboot.
And this mobo is going bad, the filters are getting soft. This causes errors. For example I hear a buzzing noise in the speakers when I move the mouse. On this machine when 98SE ran overnight, like for more than about twelve hours it would get errors and lock up. XP handles this alot better, error trapping has been superb. I can run it for at least three days straight and not have problem one. Still have a nice speedy clean shutdown as well.
And realize this, what I do on the web is mostly text based, I have no need for antivirus software of any kind. I only accept email from people I know and I do not have problems (crossing fingers). Also I use AOL for mail, with their software. No opening attachments unless I say so. I pay the ten bucks a month, mainly because I do make use of my FTP there, and casual browsing is not allowed, I have to give you a direct URL to give you the page or picture or whatever. Because of that I can put anything I want in there. I am not shackled by USC2257 nor any copyright issues, this is personal FTP. The only way a search engine can find anything in there is if I post a link to it on a public forum such as this.
So basically I am less unhappy, everything works. They dragged me figuratively in chains, kicking and screaming into this upgrade, but everything works. The bad part is that I have nothing to bitch about at the moment, except for my scanner drivers. It's a Visioneer 6100b and I swear it is the best flatbed scanner I have ever seen. It scans 3D objects superbly, and if you do it just right, can scan an area larger than it's window. Yes you heard me right. But it seems the drivers are not compatible with XP.
Soon I will make a concerted effort to get good drivers, folks, I scanned myself. I mean I tipped the thing up on it's side and scanned myself, and the rendering was very good. I don't want a new scanner, I want this one to work.
Also the soundcard drivers are unsigned and not quite right. Some sounds seem to overload the DA converter on peaks, making a nasty noise. Nothing I can do with the sound levels cures this, the problem is apparently at the front end. I tried repacing the soundcard with a good Yamaha one, and it totally crashed the system. It recovered but it may be a bad card, which would explain why I couldn't get it to run in 98SE. I had another Yamaha card which I used for a year or two, and it simply went bad, but it was way superior to what I have now. The signal to noise, the low distortion, it had some serious dynamic range. Remember I used to feed the PC audio through a 400 watt stereo. (I have no CDs, everything plays off the harddrive)
A strange thing, XP seems to disable the soundcard when it is not being used. In 98SE there was this hiss all the time, I had to turn the gain down or it got annoying, with XP, when the song or video is over it shuts up completely.
The long and short of it is that they had to really twist my arm to install XP. If 98 would do what I want I would be running it now. If 95 did what I want I would be running it now. Hell I was happy with 3.1.
They are going to have to torture me ½ to death to get me to load Vista on anything I own. I don't need a nanny. Well maybe accasionally for some wierd play, I would be up for that as long as I was "protected" with alot of restraints, but this is real life, I don't want it for real. That is what I am hearing, that Vista simply protects you too much.
That and the holes in the reverse compatability make Vista a loser IMO.
T
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