Slashdot Mirror
Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
Assuming win95 actually came out in 95 (I'm too lazy to look it up) that's not a bad track record for an OS - people are obviously still using it, although it probably won't beat the 3 years I got out of DRDOS 6.0...
once Win2k is unsupported, it's product activation time for everyone
And I have a still shrink-wrapped 6.22 upgrade...I wonder if it'll ever be collectable....
Does anyone else find it odd that all verions of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are supported by Microsoft longer than Win95? They've still got another couple of weeks on 'em for some reason... Nothing major, just seems... odd. I'm probably missing something since I should have been asleep 4 hours ago. ;-)
sharkyfour.com
Besides intentionally crippling the software, why would something work on one win32 distro and not on another? At the core they're basically the same. My understandiung is that their differences lie in bells, whistles and included driver support.
I can understand NT/win32 differences but this seems like another "mandatory upgrade" scheme.
Are they going to make a scaled down, slightly less bloated version of their kernel that they sell for less and that we can use for all the latest stuff?
That's exactly what I use Windows 95 for.
I put a copy on my Dad's old P-133 laptop so that he could do word processing for his job (he's not quite Linux ready, and neither is the laptop). It runs. And so do the programs I installed on it.
I know what you might be thinking: "that's old stuff, and old stuff is as supported as it gets on 95." Well...
there are still a lot of products out there that use simple Pentium chips and small memories that keep coming out that could use a good Windows API every now and then.
So what is our recourse for "Lite" systems, if not older versions of the software if Windows is required?
I suppose if we wait a few more years, the Windows clone will be ready, and that could replace it...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Questions
It always takes so long to execute criminals in this country...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I'm glad Win95 is moving into the unsupported phase. I'm tired of having to support the range of lamers that call in wanting USB support on Win95 that they've had installed since the year it came out with no upgrades. Does this also mean that the people who still use 95 will be considered criminals if that law passes?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Can you imagine ford decided to stop making parts for 95 mustangs? There would be a huge uproar. When you have an operating system with the quality of windows 95 or a car with similar quality and you put a large investment into it, you expect that it will remain relevent for at least 6 years.
While perhaps this isn't the most apropos place to say this, Microsoft's software support track record isn't too bad. I mean if you dig deep enough you'll find Internet Explorer 5 for Windows 3.1 which runs three times as fast and with ten percent the crashes as Netscape 3 (forget about NS 4 on a 486). And as much of a power grubbing monopoly they are, they still support an operating system most people haven't seen in three years.
Face it, the opportunity cost of maintaining any product in the 9x/ME line will continue to rise in the upcoming years. The fact that 95 through ME were essentially the same product with performance tweaks, bug "fixes," and feature additions made it easy(er) to spread DirectX willy nilly. But now we face Windows 2000 which looks like MS already wants to kill and XP, two projects that (supposedly) share minimal common code with their older brethren.
I'm sure most properly designed software that runs on 98 through ME will still run on 95 for years to come. You just won't see the latest gaming patches for it. And who runs Quake IX on Win95, anyway?
MS OSes will be unsupported:
:-)
MS DOS x.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 3.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 95 (November 30, 2001)
Windows NT 3.5x (December 31, 2001)
Windows 98/98 SE (June 30, 2003)
Windows NT 4.xx (June 30, 2003)
Anyone else find it odd that MS will be supporting DOS, Win 3.x and NT 3.5 a month longer than 95? I mean, seriously. I can count the number of people I know that have win 3.x system on one hand.
I only wish I could do that for people who use 95.
If you look on the Windows lifecycle page you'll see that MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 will become unsupported a month after Windows 95. Is it me, or is that really f*cked up?
It's news to those of us who still have a windows 95 box sitting around. It may seem cool to slam slashdot for making fun of windows, however in this case it's clearly not happening
I wonder if Microsoft is not trying to rush the "abandonware" concept. I mean if they can get rid of everything except for their next iterations of WinXP and .NET server, they can probably make up a ton of lost profit from people who don't license "every" copy of Windows they are using. That is the motive behind this in my opinion, I wouldn't be surprised if they accelarate their "unsupport" policy.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I would say there are big differences between win95 and ye-old-linux-releases, or at least, there should be:
The biggest is that you can get the super-new-linux-release for either nothing, or next to bothing. Upgrading from 95 costs you real money.
this box
However, perhaps the more important point is that not only does upgrading from 95 cost you real money - it's otherwise unecessary. If you only have 95 installed for playing games, and use (say) Linux for real work, this must be a real annoyance. Is DX8.1 really so odd that it can't work under 95, but can under 98? I think not.
I'm in the position of having win98/Linux dualboot. I *only* have win98 for games now, having moved everything else to Linux (modulo staroffice 6 beta problems, everything is very good). By the time 98 no longer cuts it for games I'll be faced with a real problem: will I have to buy a retail version of XP just to play PC games? God I hope not!
To be honest, I think it's far more likely that I'll just buy PS2 releases, or whatever console is around in 2003, and save myself the hassle of have two OSs on my PC...
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Can someone post which distros still support which releases, and to what degree? E.g. I see that debian /claims/ to still have source packages for buzz, but I couldn't find them on their site.
Novell doesn't make software for Netware 2...
Ford doesn't make wheels for a Fairlane...
_most_ software publishers targeting the 9x base to the bottom are using base win32 libraries which will still work for some time...
... which is closer to your analogy. You could concievable buy a fuzzy steering wheel for a Fairlane, but not from Ford.
Anyhoo, Windows95 sucks my balls. Good riddance.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
Just because Win95 has reached its end, DOS based games like Duke Nukem 3D work fine on Windows ME. After all, Win95 plus patches and bloat is what WinME is. This doesn't mean that Win 95 won't work any more, its just not going to be supported. There are still plenty of copies out there, its just not worth the money to support them any more.
if people wouldnt rush out and buy XP like mad
MS couldnt stop supporting older versions that
easily. the majority of people doesnt seem to
have a problem with activation, doesnt seem to
have a problem with higher costs, huge required
diskspace, enforced digital rights management,
sloppy support for MP3, discontinued support
for older games and applications and more.
its similar to politics: people get the politicians they vote for and they get the
OS they buy.
Win95 is still going to support what it was originally running on, and that is all people who have it should want it for. If they want to upgrade their computer with the newest technology, they should realize that software is technology too.
Sure, you want an OS to stick around for while, but I see no harm in upgrading from time to time as technology improves.
If they want DirectX 8.1 on a system from Win95's time, it isn't going to help anyways.
Point taken, however you're missing some critical pieces of info in your argument.
The biggest one is that the Win32 API has not changed since it came out with Win95. The system organization and a number of other things have, but that's stayed the same. That's why all the stuff that says "Reuqires Windows 98 or higher" on the box will all still run in Win95. There are a number of applications out there that require NT or 2000, but I believe that's more for organizational/security reasons rather than API incompatability and many of them you CAN get to work on Win95 with a bit of hacking. Linux, however, has had MANY feature changes, evern major revision of the kernel, and therefore supporting new apps on the old version would become increasingly difficult.
The other point is that Microsoft is a HUGE worldwide monolithic monopolistic corporation (not slamming, just using the words that best describe it) and also has great profit margins and INCREDIBLE sales. The amount it would cost them to support old OS'es compared to the profit they make on new sales is fairly insignificant, especially considering that to have a support contract with M$ is prohibitively expensive for any OS they make/have made. Linux is supported and developed by a worldwide loosely knit group of developers and hackers that has constantly shifting membership. Many OSS/Linux projects do make at least some attempt to support multiple kernel revisions/etc. but for many of them the effort would be just way too much, i.e. grokking 10,000 lines of code someone else wrote 3 years ago and didn't comment at all.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Okay, so I admit Win95 and Win98 are truly atrocious DOS-based turds, and M$ is technically right to phase them out.
*but*
Consider this : have you ever tried RealNetwork's RealPlayer ? you'd download the free version, install it, then after a while, it tells you that it didn't want to work anymore and that you have to go download a newer version from RealNetwork's site. You're happy with the version you have, but the software maker refuses to let you decide whether or not you want to keep the old version and not go through the pain of re-installing again.
Well, similarly, there are a whole lot of people out there who have a Win9x OS installed, and a bunch of apps that work reasonably well with it, and they'd be quite happy to keep using it. But M$ has decided to discontinue support for Win9x, so in effect, they've decided for the user what they should use. RealPlayer is a royal pain in the @ss when it disables itself, but at least it's free. When M$ discontinues support for Win9x, they slowly and painlessly force you to go *buy* a newer version of their OS !
Of course, it's nothing new, every manufacturer in the world (software, hardware, automotive ...) ends up discontinuing products, but usually it's only after the product is really very deprecated. I can still find aftermarket parts for my 30 year old car for example, but who's going to make aftermarket "parts" for Win9x ? nobody, because M$ is the only one to know what is in their products. And do you think a 5 year old OS is deprecated ? Linus Torvalds probably begs to differ.
So at the end of the day, it just goes to show that people should really consider opensource OSes as a long-term alternative for Windows : in 15 years, if you don't find a driver for your Linux kernel v1.2, you can always end up making it yourself if it's important enough to you. Or you can recompile this old program that you really need badly. Just like I can adapt parts from other brands of cars to mine, or even remanufacture one from scratch if I have to, because the car isn't "closed source".
In short, fsck planned obsolescence and fsck Micro$oft ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Come on, it's not like you'll find a lot of support by current apps for say, Linux 1.0.x either.
You mean you CAN'T find libc4 binaries anywhere? Man, what Internet are you from?
Until I upgraded my computer, I still had Windows 95 on it. When I replaced the 300 MHz K6-2 processor with a 450 MHz one, I was surprised to see that Windows did no longer run.
The problem was well-known; K6-2 processors of above 350 MHz were incompatible with Windows (or surely, it's the other way around?). A patch was available, but guess what? It only applied to Windows 95 release 2 or later. We poor souls still running the very first Windows 95 release were left in the dark.
After throwing out Windows, the following years were a happy multiboot-story of Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD and DR-DOS. Windows is not missed, other than the occasional urge to play Need for Speed again;-)
* MS DOS x.xx (December 31, 2001)
* Windows 3.xx (December 31, 2001)
* Windows 95 (November 30, 2001)
I guess my 3.11 loving friend had a point when he said it wasn't obsolete...
Did you mean "nicer than win98 and simpler than win98" ?
There are actually tons of OSses which are nice and simple around: BeOS, RiscOS, AtheOS...
But no: definitely not win95.
This had indeed quite more features than win3.1 but I am not sure it was that better as all the new features it had were as many reasons to crash.
It therefore seems that stability approaches with 2000 and XP (though the latter crashed at boot time yesterday... nor eason but I had 3 differently moving mouse pointers on screen...).
So, no: What was "nice" with win95 was that it triggered the disparition of the former Presentation Manager Ergonomy features.
It didn't make these as simple, though as it was using many features which were coming from differently designed platforms (NeXTstep, MacOS, RiscOS, AmigaOS...) hence making its behaviour not relevant in some situations... (the situation has not evolved ever since and besides the keyboard text selection flexibility, there is not that much either revolutionary, nice or simple in win95 GUI).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Completely untrue -- This is a post regarding a bug in Linux 0.01. And here Linus assigns the maintainer of the 0.01 Kernel. That beats IBM's 7-year maintenance policy.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yeah, my point did kinda suck a lot.
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
When this happens with Windows XP, you will no longer be able to change parts in an old computer, because doing so would require re-activation, which Microsoft won't make available after a date the company picks. This is a way of forcing users to pay more, not only for software, but for hardware, too. (Microsoft's big customers are hardware manufacturers.)
I really, really don't like Microsoft's abuse. I don't like things like the Registry, which is a database that frequently has errors that cannot be fixed with the tools Microsoft supplies. All settings for most programs are contained in the registry, and if there is bad error, it can be necessary to start over completely, and re-install all programs. For some people with a lot of programs, this can take 20 hours.
I don't like the artificial limitations which cause Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME to crash even though there is plenty of memory available.
I don't like the sloppiness and built-in weak security. This has caused billions of dollars of grief for people all over the world.
I don't like the fact that the operating system re-configures itself without any notice to the user. When there is a problem with a connection, as there often is after a computer is moved, there is no notice that something has changed.
Monopolies are not necessarily bad. Abusive monopolies are terrible.
I am very much looking forward to the time when Linux configuration and documentation are good enough that I can stop supporting Windows completely.
Why does a man who has 70 billion dollars feel that he has to squeeze money from people? Why doesn't Bill Gates relax and make a good product? Does it really make all that much difference to him to make another billion?
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
By law, auto manufacturers are required to "support" any car they make, which means making parts and service available, for 10 years after they stop building the model. There are no such laws for software.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
Yes, it does take a bit of searching:
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/dists/
Where I work, the decision was taken, many years ago, to go 95 instead of NT. Most users still have 95. The reasoning was: a) we had a shedload of dodgy DOS apps which wouldn't run on NT, b) upgrading 1,200 machines would cost big bucks.As a result, we run about 1 support person for every 70 staff.
I remember going to a pre-release technical thing at the end of 94 and the reaction they got when they explained what 95 actually was (can't remember clearly 'cos I had a very heavy night the night before) was incredible. We had to sign an NDA so we weren't allowed to tell people that it was basically Win 3.11 with a few bits rewritten as 32bit and a mutex (yes, just one) around the bits that couldn't cope with the pre-emptive multi-tasking (most of it). How they managed to get away with selling it as a "32 bit multi-tasking operating system" is beyond me. It's not 32bit, it's not (properly) multi tasking and I'm not sure it's worthy of the name "operating system. They admitted at the time that half of it was still 16bit - hence the constant "out of system resources" when the 64K user/gdi heaps ran out. The number of times I've heard users ask "why is it out of memory when I have 256Mb RAM?". The only answer I could give is "because your operating system is a bastardised heap of 16bit crap". My work machine runs 2K and people can't believe it when I say I reboot about twice a month (and yes, I develop in C++ on it). 2K might not be very good, but it beats the crap out of 9x.
I shall not mourn its passing - not that 98 is much different. They should never have been developed.
If someone's got a link to an official looking article on the subject, please post so I can send to the management along with a comment "now can we get rid of this fucking shit".
Ding dong the shit is dead!
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Lets have a minute of silence for Windows 95. A quick win32 hack that has been a thorn in Microsofts side ever since. It will be sad to see it go, since after 6 years of bugfixes it was just starting to look really good.
And since it's not really a profit to deal with win95 anymore, they shut it down. What's the deal here? If you don't like windows, they you should be happy, right? I honestly don't see the duality there. If there is such a large group that doesn't want their games for win than for linux, then there should be a gold mine there. But will people buy a lot of games for linux? In short, make your own future and choose on your own what to include in it.
On XP, anyone who has experienced any real trouble on their own with the licenses? I haven't, but I don't use a home licence (I do run legal mind you all, msdn subscription). As far as I've understood it, you to have to get a new serial if you do something, you have a 30 day grace period and there is no trouble at all getting this number if you have internet access. We are just talking minutes online or minutes on a phone. Could be it be that people who don't want to pay for their windows screaming out in anger about this?
Since I am (slowly) moving all my machines to either Free/Net/OpenBSD or Linux, I won't need MiKro$0ft (tm) products anymore.
I won't need to upgrade yet again to another buggy, slow, unstable and bug-ridden products from Redmond.
I won't have to pay to fear the latest virus-worm-security-hole-of-the-day. I won't have to agree to stupid licenses that take away my rights to poke and prode and just learn from code source.
I won't have to store all my private information in an insecure, privacy-threatening "service". I won't have to upgrade my software every time a huge, greedy company decides that I have to.
I won't even have to upgrade my (second-hand) hardware, since the (windows) underpowered PCs I have right now can run all the applications I really need. I will not have to wait for 10 full minutes for my machines to boot, and I will not have to reboot them several times per day.
Thank you, Mr Gates. By announcing Windows 9x (tm) won't be supported by your company anymore, you gave me the final incentive I needed to ditch your products once and for all.
And I am sure I won't be the only one. Have a nice day.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Windows 9x/Me were Alpha releases of Windows.
Windows 2000 was a beta.
Windows XP is, like, Windows 1.0. I mean, as a 1.0 release, it's still full of bugs - but unlike everything before (besides maybe 2k), at least it's not
I wait for the day when XP (1.0) is all that's supported, maybe by then personal computing won't still be in the stone age!
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
Win95 was the last version of Windows I could make work the way I wanted it to.
It's also the last version I will ever have bought.
I don't blame MS for moving it into the dustbin of history, but I believe they should be asking themselves what it is about their later products that people would still be using Win95.
If Microsoft, as a corporation, were capable of asking themselves such questions, they wouldn't be Microsoft.
Newer! Slower! Bigger! Less Modular! More Microsoft!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
If MS continues to publish OS's with license restrictions like XP (which they will) I think it will force more alternatives like Linux to evolve and compete...Especially if the older MS alternatives become unusable...
MS made it very clear when DX8.1 was released, Win95 isn't supported.
I'm fairly certain there's a law that if an automobile manufacturer discontinues a model/goes out of business, they have to provide parts/support for that vehicle for ten years. Is this true or simply an urban legend?
I only ask this question since M$ seems to ignore things like my 5-year-old laptop which could never handle anything above Win98, but works fine with Win95
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
Win95 was DOA...
Hey just because it was popular doesn't mean its the right thing to do... I mean would you jump off a bridge if all the popular kids did it? Of course I say all this while I wait for Win98 to download the 50 gig of updates it needs since it was released over a modem (ick).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
What kind of support Microsoft offers to their customer?....like I haven't got any support from Microsoft since day one of purchase.
- that's
insightful.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Since a Corporation is a machine and MS is an Evil machine I can only guess they have bad intentions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
Without those "artificial limitations", it's likely Win95 never would've seen the light of day. See, much of Windows 95's vaunted instability was due to Microsoft buckling under the pressure of their ISVs. Microsoft had actually removed most of the 16-bit code, and many nasty bugs. However, many ISVs told Microsoft that they weren't going to develop for Win95 immediately, since they felt that their Win3.x apps still had some life, and many OEMs and partners told Microsoft that they would not upgrade to Windows 95 unless some app (depends on the company what app that would be) was available. Thus, to be able to make Windows 95, it needed to have much better backwards-compatibility. Which meant re-introducing lots of nasty 16-bit code and a number of bugs that win3.x developers had come to rely upon. Was it wrong for them to do that? Yes, probably. But when you're a business, making money is important. Had they not, no money would be made. QED.
Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of. Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a good reason -- it's a home system, and at the time win95 was written the internet wasn't so popular. Now, if you want to make the "billions of dollars" argument, you'll have to refer to NT, which is not win9x, and has some pretty impressive security features. Yes, there were problems, too (note that IIS is not considered part of the OS), but a lot of that (I'm not saying a majority, but a lot) came from admins who had no clue what they were doing when it came to NT security. My point? Pick one or the other -- either you're talking about win9x and the weak security argument holds up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but not both.
I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that Windows networking defaults to DHCP. Don't you think the same thing would happen on any other OS that uses DHCP to get an IP address?
Either you're very naive and have no clue how publicly-traded businesses work, or you're deliberately trolling. I'll assume the former, as it's up to the moderators to decide the latter. Okay, quick lesson in the economics of a publicly-traded coporation: That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable. It does that by releasing product. In the cycle of product development, there comes a point where you have to call it "good enough" and release it so that you can sell it and a) recoup your R&D costs, and b) hopefully make a profit to keep your shareholders happy. This is what Microsoft does. Yes, Microsoft, just like any other group of developers in the world, would love to sit on a product until it's 100% perfect. Doing that, however, is economic suicide. I'm not even talking just the loss of a monopoly position. Microsoft can survive without that. I'm talking about disappearing off the face of the free market. You can't run a business designed around selling product without releasing product. It's just not possible.
An awful lot has changed in the Win32 world since Windows 95 premiered, not the least of which is the latest switch to the NT kernel for the consumer OS as well as the "pro" OS. This I think is the main reason Microsoft is abandoning Win95 support--it makes sense to stop supporting the crashy Win9x kernel as quickly as possible, now that the home version of the OS is built on NT. Let's face it: Win9x is a huge pain in the ass and support nightmare for average joes. They're always mucking something in that delicate little ecosystem up, and needing help. Compared to Win9x, WinXP is practically uncrashable and much harder for home users to screw up. The sooner Win9x is retired, the better for everyone, not just MS. And that process begins with retiring each release in turn.
Also, even within the Win9x world Windows 95 is a nightmare. The original release doesn't even support USB and can be a pain just to establish a net connection. It has drivers for, well, almost nothing beyond very bland generic basic hardware--and home users aren't very prone to updating drivers manually. Which reminds me, in the original release, no functional Windows Update to get the system updates for most people. Plus, there are three distinct flavors of Win95, and just try asking a home user "Well, is it Win95 A, Win95B, or Win95C? Well, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'About this computer', then read off the very very long number..." And any recent USB devices can be very flaky even on the Win95 versions with USB support.
And even non-USB hardware may not work on Win95. Some hardware vendors have abandoned support for Windows 95, long before MS is abandoning it. Just try to get supported Win95 drivers for a brand new ATI video card if you isbelieve--their website explicitly disclaims all support for Win95; so, maybe Win98 drivers will work, maybe not.
The problem is made worse when considering WinME, and how the subtle changes made to ME to keep average joes from seeing any DOS underpinnings broke some drivers and code. Consequently, that leaves a hardware vendor or software maker with supporting Windows 95's lack of all features and libraries in later versions, Win98's much better "completeness" of libraries and features and compatibility, WinME's not-total-compatibility with Win98 thanks to its stupid "features", Windows NT which is even more archaic in terms of compatibility and libraries and worse to support than Windows 95, Win2k and its quirks, and finally WinXP which is the new standard in the MS world. Or, they can require Win98 or Win2k minimum, as many are already doing. A lot of hardware and software makers probably don't even test on Win95 anymore even if they do claim Windows 95 will work with their product, since most of the time it *probably* will, in one way or another.
So, I think it's great that MS is dumping Win95 support at last, and not releasing new packages like DX 8.1 for it. Now, I'm all for backwards compatability--in a recent post, I even lamented that nVidia doesn't seem interested in either including rudimentary Glide support in their drivers or releasing what code they can for the Glide API, for the sake of continuing to be able to use a few great Glide games that are out there. But that's a far cry from dumping support for a 6 year old OS when Win98SE runs everything Win95 can and a lot better. After all, would you expect a Linux distro compiled in 1995 to run most apps compiled today perfectly? No--libraries have changed, and a whole lot of code everywhere has been updated since then. Win9x has always strived for compatability, so the situation is much better with Win95, but surely it's time to drop any official support.
That said, I went to the MS support download site about a month ago to download all the Windows updates to keep handy, since I have copies of all flavors and like to set up archaic OSes in VMware, and I couldn't find most of the Win95 updates. There was a download for administrators of all of them, but the link is broken now.
So, offhand, can anyone think of a place to easily obtain all of the Win95 updates at once?
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
You don't have anything like Moore's Law that applies to cars. Combustion engines don't double in efficiency every 18 months. Especially not in Fords.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Just this week I had recieve two different calls from friends with Win 95 about problems they were having. Mostly relating to the infamous "operating system not found" bug. Not all users out there get the hint that they should upgrade and maintain their operating systems. I think microsoft's move to unsupport win 95 is a good thing. This means that people will be forced to upgrade their boxes and a lot of tech guys jobs will be easier.
:)
Nevermind the bugs introduced in the new version
Rob
Couple of thoughts.
1. Windows 95 is so crash crazy (now, OSR2B isn't too bad, at least by Win9x standards) that I don't see why anyone would want to keep it around.
2. If you want to run DirectX8.1, it probably just checks the windows version number. Run a program that lies about the version number and I'd bet that the Win98 version will install. Any takers?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
That's an interesting point...Maybe this relates to XBox somehow? Seems that the majority of people who have something to lose by this are gamers...People who just run Win95/98 for internet or word processing don't need future DirectX Support, or any of the features XP offers.
This is so goddamn true, and has never even occurred to the mainstream press. Or it has and they are just ignoring it. Sometime in the future, probably after the 2003 "end of life" for WIn98, WindowsXP .NET will appear, and MS will say "We no longer reactivate unsupported products" - i.e., Windows XP.
This is the reason I am going for Windows 2000 because hopefully by the time games are no longer made to work on it, say by 2003 or 2004 (whenever the future .NET/XP codebase splits from the 2k one irrevocably), Linux will be mature enough to be a true alternative (playing catch-up with Win32 by KDE and GNOME is not my idea of an alternative, unless you are a MacOS freak who thinks that running Office 98 on MacOS really is "Thinking Different").
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Flamebait? Can somebody explain to me what has happened to /. ?
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Windoze 98 dies in 2003, huh? Well, then I guess that's when I can no longer buy new Windoze-based games for my machine, since there is absolutely no fscking way I am installing Windows XP on this system. I will absolutely not tolerate invasive spyware and pervasive copy protection measures on my machine under any circumstances. Nor will I move to Windows ME Harder, which was even more crash-prone than Win-98.
If game companies wish to continue to enjoy my custom, they can bloody well port to Linux. Hell, I'll even buy a Mac if I have to. But Windows XP will absolutely never cross the threshold of my home.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I'm not being sarcastic here (although I do shake my head), but they are a company that makes money. The way they used to make money was by releasing their OS in increments (... 3.*, 95, 98, 2K, ME) every few years. But it's getting ridiculas as people own one of their OSes for a year before the new one comes out. Their customers sit on their old versions for years before upgrading ...
...
... for now ..
So how do MS make sure that they have a sustainable income? They create an OS that is ever changing, "Rent your software!".
Ok, if they had come up with that idea in 1995, then they would have achieved their sustainable income (with minimal effort) and be on easy (easier) street. But they have to get rid of these older OSes that people won't upgrade. How do they make people go to XP? Start cutting out support of course!
So in a few years, XP will be it, MS can maintain their income with minimal effort and the hardware industry will we happy supplying new PCs for an ever growing OS that will make older PCs whine and cripple under its fluffiness
I guess the point is that it's business. That is the whole deal with capitalism. I'm not a communist, I'm just baffled at everyone's amazment at this issue. It's a dog eat dog world and MS the fattest dog
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
Each Windows OS does indeed implement the largely unchanged core Win32 API (which came out with NT, of course, not 95) but there are additions and variations throughout the product range, not all of which can be worked round by including an extra DLL or two with the app.
All the security APIs, btw, are not implemented in Win9x, and there are many other fundamental differences between the toy and real OSs. Most apps which say they only work on NT/2k do so for good reason, which is that they are using large chunks of Win32 which are not present on 9x. (On the other hand apps, such as virus checkers, which say they only work on NT Workstation and not NT Server have been deliberately crippled to try to make more money by charging more for the uncrippled version.)
Microsoft themselves, for example, earlier this year sent me a tool that ran on 2k and not on NT, because they'd used an API that wasn't on NT and they hadn't tested it on NT. When I complained they rewrote a couple of lines of code and shipped me a version that did run on NT.
Of course some apps which say "requires 98 or higher" on the box might actually run on 95. The marketroid who wrote the box may simply have been told "we haven't been arsed to test on Win95 so haven't a clue whether it works or not". Other apps will really not run on 95 because they use features not present on 95 for which there are no easy patches.
By the time Windows 2000 becomes obsolete, Linux could gain enough popularity that people can avoid product activation altogether. Companies like Opera and Real are now supporting Linux shows that it's gaining momentum now, and the fact anti-virus companies are pretending Linux will soon become a virus target shows that Linux being on the desktop is very real.
You die too easily.
I can count the number of people I know that have win 3.x system on one hand.
My god! They're running Win 3.x on their hands? I thought a 386 was a bare minimum requirement!
The problem is if you got to the joe on and try talk to them about alternatives like linux, they just say 'linux wha?'
i recon a linux* user (*or another reasonable i386 OS, eg BSD) in each town should go running around naked shouting linux* of the top of their heads. that should get the word stuck in peoples minds, and a few of them might just look it up and find ooh a free OS, thats better then windows
In my opinion windows only advantage over other OS's is games, but if they stop Dx for win95 they loose that edge
-Trevelyan
"Customers who purchase Windows XP Professional have full downgrade rights to, Windows Professional, Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows 98."
Now if only I could figure out how to downgrade RedHat 7.2 to XP, so I can get microsoft support.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Any notice that there's no mention of Windows Me on that page? I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft starts denying the existance of it pretty soon. :-)
No but you don't have to pay a fsck load of money to keep up to date with linux,
and you don't have to buy a new computer every year to keep doing the same things.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
Having developed under windows a bunch, the worst part is: There's no one Windows - All the different windowses have various subsets of the Windows API that they support. Win95 was always the least featured of this set. Under Win95 you can't assume that there even IS a web browser or directx (though NT4 has the latter problem too, but it did have OpenGL). Despite their claims of non-OS integration, MS used IE as an excuse to add a bunch of functionality in kind of surprising places, so a Win95 out of the box install (not OSR1 or 2) is missing some really handy stuff. For instance, what standard folders (eg, Desktop, Program Files, Documents & Settings, etc) you can query the location of depend on whether you've got IE installed or not. Anyways, developing with Win95 in mind has been a big pain in the ass for a while. I, as a developer, encourage MS to 'force' people to upgrade.
It's like trying to develop for 5 different unixes, but you can't use the preprocessor since it has to all be the same binary.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Id get ready IMO to say goodbye to Direct X itself, ms aren't stupid, once theyve tempted all there developers with new features of direct X which is xbox exclusive, theyll drop Direct X support for the pc, therefore all the gamers who want to play the latest games will go and get an xbox I find it very intresting that they chose to use Direct X as the first victim, this only lends me to further belive my theory. Still, perhaps im wrong
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
Finally -- someone moderated this as funny...not informative. Sheesh...
Windows95 was a huge step for the Windows world (note I didn't say computing world), and I bet most Windows people's memories for their OSes aren't even 3 years long. It's going to go out without much of a funeral, which is interesting, because it helped a lot of people "get into" computers, myself included.
Don't forget your roots.
I've reinstalled Win98SE twice because of registry rot, and now again there are weird things happening that are impossible to localise. You could assume I'm a moron, of course.
In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though
you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
So as long as you only install MS products you'll be fine. I CAN blame MS for creating a system that crashes if you dare to install products from other companies.
I'd MUCH rather have a pantsload of ini files. Then I can sort them by date and find the most recently changed ones and fix/delete/restore them. I use an installer tracker and find the average large app inserts hundreds of entries in the registry, many just cryptic strings. It's beyond human understanding.
WIN XP:
233 MHz minimum required
64 MB RAM minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space (depending on components)
WIN 95:
80386DX (or Intel-compatible processor), 20MHz
Memory 4 MB
Hard Drive Space 10 MB for Compact Installation
For a Window manager, I can't see where 1,490 megs of space go to make the difference in programs. The thing I can't stand more than anything Microsoft does is bloat. If you know the differences between the two that I am overlooking, please point them out. IE 6.0 ran on a 486 dx2 and Directx 8.0a runs on 95 as well, so barring that, whats all the fus about? oooooh It looks purty. Thanks to all of our 100 megabyte bitmaps that we paste everywhere. The base functionality has not changed, but the cpu usage has? Whats that supposed to mean?
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
Continuing that assumption: I bet you a nickel your uninstallation program/registry monitor/phase of the moon tracker/horoscope/whatnot did the corruption. heh.
The irony is, of course, that while Microsoft has been learning on the job and shipping outdated software, customers have been financing their learning experience and suffered from frequent, incompatible upgrades to boot.
Lets face it. Supporting an OS that came out in 1995 has got to be a pain in the royal ass. Can you imagine supporting Slackware 3.2? Jesus Christ what nightmare. It's fun to lay the burden of win95 at MS's feet, what, with $35 billion in the bank, but it makes no sense to have it as policy. So they are quietly getting rid of support. If there's no uproar then that means success. At least from my perspective I dont give a fuck.
The interesting thing is considering what the current win95 users will change to. Any thoughts?
No us "Mac OS freaks" think running Office v.X on Mac OS X is thinking different :)
"For some reason (we don't understand it), users kept complaining about not knowing when we'd f*ck them over the rest of the way (they already bought our software) by not supporting them anymore. Naturally, we kept ignoring them, but eventually a small band of them threatened suit. We consulted our lawyers on the possibility of counter-suing the upity users, but our lawyers indicated that the most profitable course (in this case) would be to simply comply with the users' demand. Go figure."
As I said, I'm tired. :-)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
...if the product enters non-supported phase? I believe this will happen.
Remember Windows CE 3.0 code was released albeit under shared source license.
Jawahar
http://www.diaries.com/css/
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Instead I use Linux. It's lightning-quick, has commerical and free apps, and even Windoze Gaming Support along with Native Linux Games and all the office tools I want. Why should I switch back? It's getting worse all the time. ;-)
Karma whorin' since 1999
But then I guess they'd run out of operating systems pretty quick -- but hey, some might consider that a good thing!
If you live in brasil.
Our consumer laws says that a company must keep support for a product up to 5 years after it's dicontinued.
Since win95 were discontinued only in 1998, they must keep support for it (at least here) until 2003.
What ? Me, worry ?
You can just download XP off KaZaA. (USA Build 2600 No-Activation) It's not worth it, though.... peice of bloatware crap. The default interface looks like something out of pre-primary school. Perhaps that's what Microsoft's expecting the average intelligence level of the next generation of computer-users to be. Yes, I know you can change back to the "classic" interface, but that doesn't help the fact that XP is bloated, slow, and incompatible with a large amount of software (Yes, MS marketing is bullshytting people, as usual). I'd say forget XP and download 2000.
My old Nintendo won't play Luigi's Manson, and my old Playstation won't play the Playstation 2 games, and don't get me started on not being able to play Gameboy Advance games on my original Game Boy.
You die too easily.
My friend works at BorisFX, a company which makes graphics tools, and they: :)
:)
1. Don't properly support their current versions. Most of the tech support answers are upgrade your computer, buy the latest version of our software and theres nothing we can do because it's XYZ's fault.
2.Stop supporting their old versions THE DAY their new versions are released (pretty much)
Not that i know the meaning of what M$ actually does for support... other than service paks!
Liberty.
I just saw a registry corruption in Win2k... :( My fault, really. Or rather, pagedfrg.exe from sysinternals.com messed it up. Weirdness.
Hehe... seems as Win31 will be supported longer :)
(although not significantly) than Win95
I ever knew, and it's in someones sig:
Win9x - A 32-bit extension for a 16-bit GUI
written for an 8 bit OS originally designed
for a 4-bit microprocessor purchased by a
2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
the differences between 95 and 98 are minimal. I am sure that someone could hack the installer and force directX8.1 to install on windows95.
anyone have an idea on how to override the microsoft forced install failure upod detection of 95?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wow. I had no idea.
.1 drive update would be incompatible with Win95 because it is so far removed from Win98.
I guess it makes sense that a
[/sarcasm]
I don't blame MS for moving it into the dustbin of history, but I believe they should be asking themselves what it is about their later products that people would still be using Win95.
Come on now, have a guess yourself why people are still using Win 95.
Could it be something to do with not paying $$$$$ to replace something they're quite happy with? There are believe it or not some people out there who are quite happy with win 95. They ask no more from a computer than to be good at simple word processing. Their idea of a good game is minesweeper. They don't spend their time on the internet; they spend it going out with friends.
It's nothing to do with Microsoft's shortcomings in their later products; hell, most of these people don't even know what an OS is - and there's no reason they should!
I don't know how well they'll get along without support though...
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way.
you are very lucky, I have seen bad registry on 95, 98 and 2k and I doubt that XP is free from this weakness.
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
(quote) .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
,ME, and even W2K although I work at a bank as a technician so I do get to see the "supposedly smartest people do the dumbest things" I will agree the new versions aren't half as bad as 95 was but it still happens.
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of
(qoute)
I have seen registry corruption in every vesion of 95, 98
Now the standard run of the mill /.er takes a lot of stuff for granted. Yes, we can peek and tweak our systems so they run acceptably regardless of the OS. But I know for a fact that trying to do tech support for older machines running w95 can be a complete PITA. Especially with people giving their "hand me downs" to family members. Amazing on how these days when we do a broadband install, how many people have slower machines that really can't appreciate the bandwidth that they are getting. Not even to mention the fact that online shopping (which is a big seller in the rural area we cover) doesn't really work with the 3.0 browsers.
Now before this gets modded into oblivion, just think about how fast the web is changing everything. People (other than gamers) aren't just using their computers for word processing, it's all about email,browsing,home finance, online banking, shopping. As the websites get larger and more complex, they suck up more space and memory on the computers.
Luckily windows 3.1 dialup support died for us Dec 31 2000, so we didn't have to worry about Trumpet winsock et al. anymore.
Windows 95 can be a major problem when working with a newbie who still thinks that the mouse is a "foot pedal" like that on a sewing machine (yes it's true, I actually had a call like that). I mean the Internet Setup Wizard is a piece of cake, but the majority of the people who are hip enough to navigate the web have allready moved on to 98/ME/XP/2K whatever.
This can actually help out ISP's by not having to worry about support for computers that were "given" to people without the CD. (ever try changing DUN settings or reinstalling Client for MS without the CD on an "upgraded" system where the CABS weren't installed?)
I've experienced this first hand with "Why is the internet so slow?" check the settings, and the person has 8MB o RAM running w95 and someone gave them a CD with I.E. 5.x and somehow they got the thing to kinda run. By the time they have to go out and get SIMMS enough to run the browser du jour (Opera notwithstanding) they might as well go out and get a whole new system for $700 USD.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the way MS handles things is correct, but at some point the lower end of the bell curve of internet users has to catch up to really experience everything the web/net has to offer.
Look at dialup, without updated modem drivers/init strings, the cheap HSP modems
won't maintain a connection. If the computer starts losing memory, the winmodems die. It doesn't occur to these users who think that computers just magically "work" that it could be their own system, and not the network and support that the ISP offers.
But I still love all the phone calls I get because the default error message states "call your network administrator" everytime something happens... NOT!
So I guess in closing this is going to be a way to keep people happy in the long run.
I mean hey I still have netscape 2.0 running on a 1MB RAM Macintosh, but other than email, what good is it?
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Install a pirated non-spyware version of XP on my computer. (Yes, they exist)
Buy a licence- and leave it in the box.
Then I get to satisfy my conscience and my paranoia.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
However, posting the fact that it doesn't work constitutes an unauthorized review of the software, which means that all stores issuing the corrections are operating illegally, unless they have been given permission to do so.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Have you looked here?
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I keep a copy of Windows 98 around for Starcraft (Wine broke it and needs Windows DLLS to work) and free long distance via dialpad (non-existant now), but my friends claim that windows 2000 is the best product MS has ever (or will ever) release. I assume Wine prefers Windows 98 DLLs to Windows 2000 libraries, but I will switch to Windows 2000 when I hear Wine likes it.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
MS's decision to drop support for Win95 is not surprising, but that does not mean that everyone will immediately rush to the store (or to their IT support group) looking to upgrade. For example, according to a recent article by GartnerGroup, there are still a lot of large corporations using Win95 as their standard desktop OS. I've talked to some corporate IT folks about this, and I believe that there are a couple reasons why they hae not already upgraded:
1. Win95 works. Most office workers don't need anything more than Win95 and Office95. Since it meets their needs, why spend the thousands of dollars that it would cost to buy new software?
2. The effort to migrate thousands of desktops is expensive (advocates of the Linux desktop should remember this). Remember that this is a manual process. So again, don't do it unless it's really necessary.
3. These companies figured out a long time ago how to run Win95 in a stable, reliable way, so they don't need support from MS.
A lot of the desktop hardware that is still running Win95 won't support the newer OSes. As that hardware gets replaced, the final death of Win95 in the corporate environment will begin. But it will take a couple years.
you are very lucky, I have seen bad registry on 95, 98 and 2k and I doubt that XP is free from this weakness.
You actually expect a Microsoft shill to tell the truth? Remember when Win95 came out? "Its so stable! I've never had it crash!" Win98? Same thing. WinME? Yet again, the same old lies. You really expect these people to open their eyes and take a look at what Microsoft's doing?
I have an AST Advantage 613E. It's a reasonably old computer - with a Cyrix 100mhz in it. The only operating system I can get it to run in properly is Windows 95. Neither 98 nor Linux recognise the graphics adapter, and leave it running in 16 colours. I'd rather not have to run it in console mode permanently, so what should I do now?
I've reinstalled Win98SE twice because of registry rot, and now again there are weird things happening that are impossible to localise. You could assume I'm a moron, of course.
No wonder everyone here hates MS so much--the article talks about Win95, you're using Win98SE. Trust me, THOSE SUCK. Win95 sucks, 98 sucks, 98SE sucks, ME is probably the worst of all of them. Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems. Not that 2000 doesn't have any problems, but it is a much, much better OS and the problems are fewer and farther between.
Even if you actually decided to buy the OS, the $100 or so would be well worth getting rid of the frustration of 95/98/etc. A guy here at my work uses 98 and it is nothing but trouble.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
Microsoft has itself declared that it supports its software for 6 years after the release date. Even the mindless techs at my publicly-funded workplace know this. They just performed a truckload of Win98 upgrades in the past couple of months (which of course made everything worse, since they just ran the upgrade over the existing Win95 base).
Windows 2000 will stop being supported sometime in 2005, XP will die in 2007. So be it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You won't find Win95 on new machines and the old ones are probably not fast enough to run the new games.
Except Win2000 kinda sucks as a gaming platform. Not being able to use my MS Forcefeedback kinda drove me away from it.
I've heard one reason WINE is successful is because of the fact that, unlike the days of DOS, Microsoft can't a newer version which is conveniently incompatible with their competitors.
As Microsoft has to ensure that applications run properly on the different flavors of Windows, WINE knew that they had (more or less) a stable API to implement.
But... perhaps now with the expiration dates on Windows, Microsoft can slowly begin to break WINE's implementation?
http://www.talknerdy.org
The lifecycle on their products is relatively long and overlay a great deal. As such, even though Windows 95 is officially unsupported, they still must support Windows 98, which was compatible with Windows 95 nearly completely. They are still stuck with the win32 API. When 2003 rolls around and Win98 is axed, then WinME will carry the support, then when ME is axed, XP will be supported, etc.... .NET strategy, leveraging the Desktop dominance to get more major companies running .NET servers...
Though they can make minor changes, but for now backwards compatibility prevents them from axing any backwards compatiblity.
The problem for Wine remains the same, the API is huge and not well documented, and while not deprecating calls, they are still adding calls every release. As far as releases not being made with Win95 in mind by 3rd party companies, that has been and will remain their pergative. Some already say "no, we don't support that" Others will continue to test against it even if MS says it's unsupported.
Wine is catching up really fast, and the Win32 API is changing slowly (not a bad thing). I doubt MS sees Wine as that much of a threat right now. Wine is only useful for Desktop-level applications, and MS's only real threat is in the server arena, where all applications are run natively and thus wine becomes a moot point. The relatively small segment of Desktop linux users doesn't cut much into MS's bottom line. That's the whole deal with the
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Microsoft must force people to upgrade to keep their revenue stream healthy.
BTW, I hope that Win2000 is the last version of Windows I ever need!
-Mark
The hardware underneath has not changed much. A month ago they celebrated the last of the 16 bit code again. That chunk of code could have run on an 8088, just like MS DOS 3.2 can run on my AthlonXP. The hardware folks have gone to great lenghts to maintain compatibility. In the same way I can move Linux hard disks around the room from a 486 to an Athlon and have it boot.
Where's the software improvement? Can anyone out there name one thing that I can do in XP that I could not do under Win3.1 or DOS? Movies, check, audio, check, ethernet, check, IP suite, check, instant messenger, check, dancing icons and goofey sounds, check. All of it was possible, despite the artificial 16Meg RAM limitations, under their dinky single user non multitasking software. Today, their dinky single user non multitasking softare acts much the same, but it's a little faster thanks to hardware improvements. Win 3.1 flies on the same hardware that 9x chokes with more code than it takes to fly the space shuttle. If bloat is improvement, OK, there has been some real change.
M$ would have you believe that you are a "consumer" of software and that bytes somehow go stale in time. I've never eaten a byte in my life. It's hard for me to believe that their non compatibility issues are anything but planned.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Sometimes it didn't even load Windows. Sometimes it froze on bootup because of registry errors. Around August/September I called a friend over to help me find the problem, and it turns out it was an improper setting I had selected in the BIOS which was causing 98 to corrupt not only the registry files but the autoexec.bat file as well.
But, during those months when I was having the registry issues, I learned a few things about how to backup and restore those troublesome files. Win98SE, by the way, is far better equipped to handle these things than any previous version of 9x. You're able to make backups of the registry into CAB files with the program scanregw.exe. Just open the Run prompt and type that. It'll do a quick scan, then offer you the chance to back up the current files. I usually did this always after installing something so if I had a serious reg error I wouldn't be forced to reinstall it. (I lost a Black & White game that way) It's a good idea to do this regularly.
Now, when it comes to restoring the registry, 98SE should be able to handle it itself if the error isn't too serious. If the files are totally corrupt 98 may not even load. In that case you can boot to DOS by pressing F8 right before Windows starts loading or with a boot disk, and type SCANREG /RESTORE to restore the files. Failing that, there's one more route you can take. Boot to DOS, and go to the Windows directory. There is a hidden directory called SYSBCKUP which contains the CAB files for the last five registry backups. Check the dates on them to see which one is the best to restore from, and just use EXTRACT to place them back into the Windows directory (or is it Windows\System... don't recall. Easy to find out).
So basically it's not that big of a deal. I'm not familiar enough with NT/2000/XP to know how it works yet, but it's fairly easy to do in 98. Just some ways I described above are more time-consuming than others.
Of course, the other option is to use a disk imaging program like Norton Ghost, but that depends on how large your Windows partition is, if you have sufficient storage space for the image, etc.
There is no escape from The Muffin.
Dunno, I used win2k for gaming and have never had a problem--but I don't use forcefeedback. Even games like the Sims that say only 95/98/Me work fine.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
I've got an annoying registry corruption on my Win98SE box. Apparently somehwere in the registry is recorded that I have a certain Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime DLL that is either corrupted or gone. The error message won't tell me which one (there are several versions; newer versions of MSVC++ come with new sets of runtime libraries, which get distributed with applications written in MSVC++). This has broken a half dozen major applications on my box. Reinstalling one or more of the apps won't help; the system thinks the DLL is there, so it won't reload it when reinstalling an app that needs it. Anyone know where in the reigstry one would look to correct this? Sort of that, I'll need to reload the partition.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
So, intersestingly, it is very obvious that the full lifetime of product decrease ...
Moreover, windows 2000 has the shortest lifetime and is currently in use in lots of (big) companies for which winXP doesn't make a lot of differences (play games ?)
#include "coucou.h"
I wish that Windows handled the registry similar to the way OPENSTEP/OS X uses the defaults system. If you run defaults, you'd think that a ton of data was locally stored, just like the Windows registry. This makes it very easy for programs to grab information and to reconfigure things very quickly. Actual investigation, however, shows that the defaults system gets its info from a mess of plists in I believe ~/Library/Preferences . Best of both worlds: you have everything centralized you can quickly figure out what's happened and reconfigure things easily, and yet at the same time you don't risk so-called registry rot because all that's really happening is that the OS is making a mess of XML files appear as one database. Thus "defaults write com.apple.windowserver.appearance NEXTSTEP" makes it appear as if you're accessing a specific slot in the database, when you're actually grabbing the file named com.apple.windowserver.appearance.
> Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of.
> Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a
> good reason -- it's a home system, and at the
> time win95 was written the internet wasn't so
> popular.
Ironically, Nimda, Code Red and other major viruses these days target IIS and NT systems. Win98-systems are ununaffected. At my office, all the NT machines were quaranteed for a week when Code Red slipped through the corporate security policies and infected on or two machines. All Win98 machines were left online because they were affected. This happened again with Nimda, except the machines were offline for only a day.
This lead to the joke that if we wanted to be virus-free, we needed to upgrade from WinNT/2000 to Win98.
and M$ are spamming Novell users with false statements regarding the lifespan of Novell products.Article and then they are even worse themself.
People will bring servers to their knees to get the latest one-line change to the Linux kernel, and yet they'll run a mid-1990s version of the Windows lines and wonder why they have trouble.
The other day I was talking with a group of non-technical people and I brought up the existence of other OS's. I mentioned Linux was a free alternative to MS.
I was then asked, "Can it get on the internet?"
I replied it could, and could do so very easily, and well before MS was able to say as much.
"But doesn't Microsoft mean 'Internet'? I thought they were the same thing."
At this point, I realized that we have lost. There's not a chance in hell we'll be able to convince the masses to change over to Linux when many make statements like, "Why bother, it works for me."
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
. . .but what about that disco-maniac Steve Ballmer. MS software isn't inherently evil, but all indications are that Operations and Marketing at MS are pretty damned evil. Halloween Documents, anyone ???
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years ..., though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
Ah, the classic "it doesn't happen to me"... Just because you dont see serious abuses of a persons human rights does not mean its not happening out in the rest of the world. The same goes for computer issues. Also, I would say I fault Microsoft for a system that allows 3rd party developers to write code that CAN bring down the whole system.
I do not want to even get into the "OS family" convoluted mess that is Microsoft's product line. I particularly like the following from their lifecycle page:
"Once you legally license a Microsoft Windows operating system, it is yours to use for as long as you wish."
The wording is already there...
"However, the longer you use an operating system, the less likely you will be able to take advantage of software and hardware advances that over time become mainstream in personal computers, devices, and software applications."
Why invest in a system that will be EOL'd while you are using it. As a Debian user that uses the Debian system to keep up to date as well as my own independant compiling, I cannot not imagine this.
Being a lowly computer grunt, I see a lot of machines with a lot of problems, and I must say, for all versions of windows, registry rot isn't a huge problem. People installing crappy programs that mess up the OS is a huge stability problem, as are viruses.
The only problem that I have seen fairly regularly that seems to be the result of registry corruption is where windows sees a new NIC in the device manager and in the network properties, but not in winipcfg or ipconfig. This problem, other then not allowing the computer to use the NIC for connectivity, has no determental problems on the computer and is not the cause of any instability as far as I can tell.
OTOH, the registry can be easily backed up, on a regular basis, as long as you know about the task manager and know the basics of DOS batch files. The registry is 2 simple binary files, user.dat and system.dat, IIRC. So if you believe the registry is the cause of your problems, BACK IT UP!
I remember trying to shove the super-nintendo cartridges into my old NES (I still have the one with the springed-front loader.) Man, did zelda 3 look *weird*.
while the marketing team is as usual hard at work at Microsoft in an attempt to cover up their inferior products with cute and repetative jingles and clever alliances, many users still are fuming at their latest in the usual chain of fatal errors, BSOD's and of course, corrupted data and data and apps that once could work but now cannot through the incompetence of Microsoft. Many are even noticing that other OS's are gaining in popularity despite the lack of advertising, causing many to question the worth of any product that is hyped so very much instead of spending those legal and marketing fees on QA and actual production and support.
I think there should be a special place in hell for the sonsofbitches that came up with the registry. Why not UNIX text files or the Mac's Preferences folder. Instead, Gates et al invent a way of storing key info that can we wiped out by the installation or deinstallation of any piece of software. I have seen literally scores of registry corruptions, some of them bringing down enterprise systems of a critical nature. The whole registry is absolutely assine.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The school that I'm forced to attend features labs full of slow Win95 machines, connected to an NT server (with some NT machines littered around). I understand this is fairly common practice in most schools. I suppose they still need 95 for running some older programs, but considering that the computers are usually used for nothing but personal surfing...
My MS ForceFeedback Sidewinder Joystick worked great in Win2k (I use WinXP now). Too bad the only game I have that "requires" a joystick is Mechwarrior 4 :-/. What a waste of a $100 ...
- Arcadio
Mind you, I upgraded to a 1GHz machine with 2KServer so it all became moot...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I think that the Boeing777 game console, the one embedded into the seat (at least at the economy class of the only B777 I flew, belonging to Continental Airlines) is based on Windows 3.11!!
At the very least, its UI and dialogs are the same, and the GPFs are all there in the old familiar form of the dialogs :) In the
flight survey option, however, there was
no way to file a bug report :))
VKh
Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems. Not that 2000 doesn't have any problems, but it is a much, much better OS and the problems are fewer and farther between.
That's what everbody used to say about NT 3.51, then 4.0... Supposedly it was going to "revolutionarize the way we do computing," or some such crap, very similar to the XP propaganda.
And you know what? Back in 1998, I tried to install NT on a machine that had Linux, SCO OpenServer, and Windows 95 on it. The Windows installation program wiped out my entire partition table, then said there was some kind of error and it couldn't continue (and it only gave an error code, it's not like it actually explained what the error was).
This product, my friend, is below any conceivable standards of software quality and engineering. I haven't used any MS junk since the above incident, and I've been happily running Linux with 12-15 months uptime on average, and unparalleled flexibility and robustness.
Bush Lies Watch
I vaguely remember a PC Magazine from 1991ish where they answer the question "Why can't Windows 3.1 run in real mode". I believe that Windows 3.0 was the last version to support real mode, and of course protected mode requires a 386.
My employer has still not replaced all the OSes from Win95 to Win-?. We now have a mixture of several different versions. Maybe this will be the catalyst to finally get folks to look seriously at Linux. I for one, have used Linux exclusively since '94 when Desqview/X bit the dust. (there are also several hundred Linux installations here out of thousands of desktops).
Which points out one of my real peeves about Microsoft: at a certain point they stop releasing service packs and patches, and start releasing changes to the OS using all sorts of sneaky non-documented methods. If you were an OEM and had access to OSR 2.5, great. But if you were a home user of W95, after Service Pack 1 (W95 SP2 being basically useless) you were out of luck. Same with NT 4 today: where is Service Pack 7?
sPh
I have one last computer at home that is running a Windows OS. It's only there for the kids and wife.
I will be more than a little pleased to use this as an excuse to inform them that they have 18 months to become familiar with the likes of KDE/gnome.... for their computer useage. Of course, if the internet is still as IE specific in many areas, this will mean that a lot of the internet will become unaccessable to me.
If I cannot access certain internet websites because of a lack of browser support, doesn't that qualify me for the Americans with Disabilities Act?
Not that I disagree with you. I would have left the windows world years ago if I had to pay for their damn upgrades. However, the University I'm at has Pact, so I pay $5 for upgrades to windows and can download upgrades to office, so the impetous to move to something else isn't as high for me.
But you must remember, this is the same company that got a huge backlash from the technical community (including its own ass-kissers) about Product Activation and it basically just said "fuck em"
Microsoft is successful because it knows how to appeal to and stay in the good graces of the masses. What the technically elite think matters little to them.
Since I'm a movie buff, I can easily tell you one. Win2k doesn't support DVD acceleration on Nvidia video cards while XP does. I like watching DVDs and prefer to use Nvidia's products, so moving up to XP was a no brainer (for me anyway). As for WPA, there are many ways around it (I'm sure you know this).
Something tells me that they aren't reading your post and crying that they've lost a customer... (If I were a game developer, I'd be crossing my fingers waiting for the day when the only windows operating systems were "real" operating systems (ie, 2000, XP)!)
Windows 2000 doesn't have any invasive spyware or pervasive copy protection measures, by the way.
I'm still waiting for Windows 95 to make everything I do faster, and more fun. It still doesn't do that.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
then again, the very same thing happened to me when i installed debian/ppc a while ago...
check your speling
Opengl is better than DirectX anyways
There do exist programs that work in Win95, but which do not work under Win98. That was one of the original reasons for not upgrading my Win95 machine. Unfortunately, the manufacturer of the program was acquired by another company, and the product (Encore! from Passport Designs) was never upgraded. It was a good program for writing simple music scores, not too complex, but good enough to do most of what a children's music teacher would need. Including color coding certain notes, so that they would stand out.
I am not aware of a comparably good music scoring program for any platform. It was not as complete as Finale!, but was much easier to use, and use quickly, which is an important part of its utility. I own several different music scoring programs, but this is the only one that ends up being used. (YMMV, of course. It all depends on ones purposes.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It used to be that ivory tower types biatched and moaned about how bad bad AT&T system V unix was and how evil AT&T was.
With linux you don't have any evil big corporation to blame for problems.
Is it just me, or academics just whiney anti-capitalists?
In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files.
.ini files. It's easier to deal with when you don't know what you're looking for, specifically, but just need to browse around looking for something that's out-of-place. Also, in that situation you can make changes (and un-make them) without blowing something else out of the water.
I'll take the pantload of
With the registry, who knows what's going to happen. "Go ahead, press that button." Do I really want to? How do I get back to where I am now if this doesn't work?
Give me a nice editable text file that I can read, copy, edit, and put back the way that it was if needed.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Then again, sometimes Windows (I deal with NT4 & 2000) just won't listen to you no matter how many commands you give it. You might also search the net for a program called OLEView (comes in Visual Studio and the NT Reskit). OLEView will show you what file the system actually uses when it needs a particular object (from a dll). Then you can be sure about which file you need to unregister and replace.
Regards,
Stephen
It really made concentration difficult with that guy swearing all the time, and the machine crashing every now and then. One reason was Windows's instability, the other was Word's inept features at page layout.
After a month or so my friend got this guy to install CygWin and run LaTeX from a unix server through X. After that: peace and quite all the way. Since Windows did nothing but run the XServer, it stayed up, and LaTeX made document editing ridiculously easy.
The major addiotion in (98/me/xp) were in COM based API (new interfaces). No new header files
i remember being able to go to the windows update site using win 3.11 and it actually gave me updates for it too!?!?!?
Oh no. They want to get RID of Win95. If they released the code, hackers worldwide would begin fixing bugs and such, and very soon everyone would be using Windows 95OSR5, or whatever, instead of Me/XP.
Today the big three automakers have decided to stop manufacturing parts for their vehicles after 6 years.
When asked about this new policy, one anonymous CEO responded, "No one keeps cars longer than 6 years anyway." "I mean, c'mon, the longest auto loan you can get is 5 years anyway."
He also added, "this will make us cost competitive and increase shareholder value going forward."
Owners of cars older than 6 years old will just have to bite the bullet and buy a new car.
"This new policy will insure future auto growth in what has become a stagnant market" said another CEO.
When asked about this new policy most managers at the big three simply replied a cryptic, "all your money are belong to us".
-ted
I see no slam in this piece of news at all. It is merely informing us of the fact that Microsoft is going to drop their support of software that has reached it's end of life.
Microsoft is now four to five revisions away from their release of Windows 95 (depends on how you look at the release sequence and what you count as being a release), and six years beyond that time of release. The hardware being put out these days is almost 100% not a part of the original HCL for Windows 95, and Microsoft has done a decent job of keeping things up to date with Windows 95 anyway.
With new faster hardware coming out everyday, and new software taking advantage of that new hardware, there has to be updates to the underlying operating system to support both the hardware and software coming out. Windows 95 can't do that anymore.
Everything's in one place...
You mean all your eggs are in one basket. I prefer 1000 ini files to the registry any day. If you really want to keep them together, make an INI directory in the windows directory and quit complaining.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Windows 2000 came out which was really the next major upgrade to Windows NT. Most commercial software companies stop releasing patches to older versions of software when a brand spanking new one comes out. It's a fact of commercial life. a) you need to redirect the resources that were maintaining version 1 to maintaining version 2 and b) you want people to stop using version 1 and *buy* version 2.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You might want to try running Norton Systemworks (Windoctor). It scans the registry and can remove or fix messed up registry entries. Fixed alot of registry problems I have seen, although not all of them.
Just because a registry system _appears_ to be a single point of failure does not necessarily mean it is.
/etc directory on a seperate partition, or even drive. Why do they do this? To place another layer of abstraction between the data and the accessor (with the "accessor" being the programs which manipulate the data). If the accessor happens to kill one partition or even drive, then you will have your /etc still safe (if you took the advice, of course). From when I understand, MS uses a single file as a registry. This is not a great idea because the accessor can simply delete the file (or even end-user). There is nothing _wrong_ with the idea of a registry. The way MS does it is poorly thought out, though. Data is not safer just because you have it in readable plaintext. It is more convenient on Unix because there is a plethora of text-based tools. Problems occur when complex configuration data is stored (don't get me started on sendmail, and the fact that almost every *IX program has a different configuration language you have to learn). The database registry way is the future.
Let me explain. If you have ever read partitioning HOWTOs for Linux, BSD, etc. they typically recommend placing the
Regarding NT security, and administrators who had no clue what they were doing... Why should it be that you need a clue to set it up? Seems to me that all of the MCSE & etc. certification only reflects the fact that setting this stuff up is overly complicated (and unnecessarily so).
Regarding the Registry... It is a necessary evil, but it's implementation in Windows (pick any version) contains some fundamentally bad concepts. Why is it that things have to break if I move an application from one partition to another?... or even from one directory or another. If you start running out of space in a partition, you have to uninstall (not delete) the space hogs and reinstall. Compare this to the Macintosh who's registry is maintained at the Finder, and moving applications causes no such grief. If Mac's desktop database gets corrupted (akin to a munged Registry), just tell the OS to rebuild it.
Well, I have a whole set of HP-UX installation media. It has tons of tools, including the ANSI C Compiler and all the goodies. I can't use any of it except the base HP-UX part because the rest of it requires a 'key' from Hewlett-Packard to install and use.
I have a whole set of CDs for the C compiler for Sun's Solaris OS also. It too is useless because I don't have the 'activation key' needed to get it to install.
This notion that the XP activation key is something new and evile is ridiculous. Microsoft has historically been wide open and free to use and their products have been open to people who want to use them. The fact that they've now started being as niggardly and 'closed' as the Unix software market always has been is just disappointing. It's the end of an era of cheap computing, the era of Microsoft's dominance of the market. Prepare for all sorts of keys and dongles and restrictions on your PC. Because the Unix philosophy appears to be winning: sysadmins decide what you get to run on your workstation.
Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems.
No, you'll just have problems with Win2k not flushing the write cache on IDE drives before powering off. The "bugfix" from Microsoft didn't fix it.
What did it cause us? Registry problems, incidentally. Win2k refuses to boot because the registry is corrupt. Not even safe mode. And having an ERD or using the backup registry doesn't help; every time you log in the registry changes and trying to roll it back to a recent (2 days ago) backup confuses the shit out of AutoDesk Inventor since they're paranoid about pirated software. Using an old registry also confuses Office 2000. So I ask again, what use is this proprietary, very undocumented, unreadable and practically unfixable single point of failure? Hell due to its very nature backups don't even work!
Give me separate ini files or give me a human-readable, fully documented registry. Ideally, give me all of that and a bugfix that actually works!
Win2k is a lot better than anything that came before. It is not, however, infallable. These problems are experienced on high-end (dual proc, 1G RAM) CAD workstations with mid-end (AutoDesk, Inc.) software. Who do you blame now? Microsoft, for creating a horrendous single point of failure, Microsoft, for not actually testing their bugfix, or AutoDesk for following Microsoft's reccomended programming practises and using the registry for everything and anything?
First, despite what you may think of Microsoft, I think we can agree that comparing their "abuses" to human rights abuses is hardly fair. Microsoft bundling WMP7 with XP is hardly on a scale with bombing innocent Afghans or denying women the ability to travel freely.
Second, you're complaining that the third party developers shouldn't be able to code things that can bring down the whole system... so you're saying that you want MS to close their operating system even more? You want the only software with access to any kind of computing power to be MS software?
So what are you saying here...
(a) that we should still be able to use Win3.1 and be able to do everything we do on our XP boxes, or...
(b) that nobody should use MS because, like all other software in the world, it eventually goes obsolete, and that we should all, even my grandmother, be using and continually recompiling Linux kernels and all that? Sorry, I like my OS to be the thing I don't have to worry about, and XP has pretty much done that.
(c) that MS should have provided free upgrades to 95, 98, etc.?
Ummmm, unlike Linux (which is, despite the fact that there are several businesses selling it, a "non-profit service") Microsoft is a BUSINESS. Meaning that they have to make MONEY. And the best way to make MONEY is to sell PRODUCTS. And if you're giving your products away for free to anyone who has the cheaper, earlier version of your product, you won't make any money selling them the newer, shinier version of the product. Whenever Hoover makes a newer version of their vacuum, do they owe it to you to give it to you for free? Yes, your old vacuum still works, just like Win3.1 still works (and it fits on four 1.44MB floppies.) But if you want the newest features (and I don't know what features one would add to a vacuum, so it's probably a poor metaphor) you can't expect to have them on your Hoover from the mid-70's.
InigoMontoya(tm)
This signature is self-referential.
...this from a guy who believes that running Windows 2000 is "thinking different"?
You'll be able to use the "no mature alternatives" excuse for using Windows forever, by the way. Enjoy your stay in hell!
~jeff
Sure it works as a joystick, but with Force Feedback (the whole reason I paid so much)?
Maybe it's different with the original FF (which I brok), but my FF2 (which I bought to replace it) gets no feedback at all in Win2K or WinXP.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
Hey, why was this modded down? This is insightful information!
sPh
... when a child goes before its parent:
Windows 95 goes 11/30/01
Windows 3.x goes 12/31/01
MS-DOS goes 12/31/01
Windows NT 3.5 goes 12/31/01
WTF?
Yes, but did you entirely quit having anything to do with Linux as a result of the misfortunate incident?
If not, you're clearly not the wise expert the other guy is who's refused to use anything Microsoft related since 1998 but still considers himself qualified to comment in this thread.
Just a few relevant points (that may or may not have already been covered): a) Win95 support doesn't "die" until the end of this year (this I know, i'm sitting 20 feet from 300 people sitting in the 9x queue... 9x includes 95). b) 95 doesn't "die". A ridiculous amount of people still use it, and tech support will be handed off to an outsourcer who will own the 95 project completely and seperately from Microsoft. We can only hope and pray that people (if they haven't already) will stop developing applications for windows 95. However much we would like it to die and just go away, it wont. c)activation will be ongoing in MS products from now on. If you get rid of activation for any product, you essentially throw however much money you spent on developing that OS out the window (no pun intended) because it is impossible to install it. MS has never "killed" a product in such a way, and never will. d)9x sucks, this we know. 2k was good, XP is better. Stop installing Norton Systemworks with cleansweep and other such registry-wreckers and watch your registry operate on its own just fine.
And damnit! Why isn't Linus releasing patches to keep my system based on the 1.2 kernel up to date and solid!?! That greedy bastard!
then again, the very same thing happened to me when i installed debian/ppc a while ago...
OK. So there's a possibility that an installation program destroys your partition table, regardless of who the vendor is.
However, I'm an operating system junkie, and I've installed various distributions of Linux (Debian included), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Debian/Hurd, SCO OpenServer, Solaris x86, all without problems. The reason for this is probably because I always choose to manually fdisk my hard drive, as opposed to using an automated equivalent. Windows, however does not give you this option. So there.
Bush Lies Watch
Linux is great for almost everything that I do both at work and at home, but sometimes I need to run Win4Lin, and rarely now I need to boot into straight up Windows. And when I have to run Windows, I use Windows 95 (OSR2) because it's cheap and effective. I rarely have any problems with it, especially when I apply a few patches. I hate Windows 98 for being relatively slow and bloated, and I especially loath the Windows update feature. I want the system doing as little as possible behind my back. I also see no reason to "upgrade" to anything beyond IE4 SP2 for the same reason. As far as I am concerned, the only new features in Windows98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Internet Explorer 5, etc, is more bloat, more security flaws, and increased network reporting to Redmond. I basically do computer sales and support for my entire family, and I have had very few problems with Windows 95. I am sad to see Windows 95 pronounced dead before it's time, but I have a stockpile of Windows 95 licenses for the future.
James
http://james.nontrivial.org
Well, I can write a simple program in C to corrupt the registry if that's what I want. I don't have to download some tricky utility from a website full of 'expert' registry 'tweakers'.
Monopolies are not necessarily bad. Abusive monopolies are terrible.
I must disagree. Monopolies are inherrently untrustworthy. That's why it's common for large companies to refuse to deal with a sole-source (others don't have that luxury).
Monopolies are inherently evil. The purposes of whoever is in control of the monopoly will not align with anyone else, and the leverage that the monopoly provides will be used. With sane leadership this is used with a light enough hand to avoid much protest. This is still evil, though mainly becuase of setting up a condition in which furture evils will flourish. Particularly, a monopoly will act to defend it's monopoly as if it were defending itself. This is, in its way, rational. But it reveals the power center in a way that calls attention to itself. Also the culture of a monopolistic organization develops to approve of centrallized control (it's much easier to think well of yourself if you believe that you are doing good).
The problem is, that a monopoly may act reasonably for some period of time, but eventually there will be a new board of directory, or CEO or Director or President. And the more centralized power is present in a position, the greater attraction it has to a certain class of sick minds: The control freak. They have many different ways to justify their actions, but it is essentially a form of paranoia. (Possibly more than one form.) These people can pass themselves off as normal, and usually believe that they are. But they are psychos. Some of them can be satisfied by minor acting out, and this is relatively harmless..the president of a PTA group, etc., but once they get their hands on coercive force they are reliably untrustworthy. They cannot be satisfied by any reasonable degree of control, because their essential drive for greater control arrises internally, and is not due to rational consideration of the circumstances.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You're right. There's no point in trying Windows 2000 yourself. Just brand anybody else who has as a 'shill' and keep remembering how awful Windows 95 was on that machine you had with the 8 bit sound card with broken driver support, the shitty graphics card that there never really was a Windows 95 driver for, etc. etc.
Don't open your eyes and look at what Microsoft is doing. (improving) It'll just dismay you and you'll realize what a fucking idiot you are.
Becuase they want to force everyone into a controlled activation scheme.
They'll come out with some whiz-bang superduper freebie widget that, while it should work just fine under w2k, it requires XP.
Isn't it funny that they terminated 95 with a version of directx required by the latest games, which doesn't work with 95, just after the release of the activation-managed XP?
I'll bet you that was no coincidence, nor an accident. What they've done is force more people into XP. Once they have all of the licenses under their control, they can now force people to shell out more money at their whim.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
And the guy in the Mercedes garage sees all the possible problems that can go wrong with a Mercedes, too.
I wouldn't consider his experience that of the typical Mercedes customer, however.
But as a Debian user you sacrifice huge amounts of functionality.
You can't design with Xilinx FPGA parts. You can't do vector-based drawings with any amount of ease. Hell, you can't even watch quicktime video off the net.
I can keep my IBM Selectric oiled and running smooth, too. It will never be EOL'd by an evile corporation. If all I want to do when I sit down at a keyboard is type.
It is not reasonable and discriminatory to refuse to license IP. Either MS should stop trying to collect payments for use of its discontinued IP (Allow free exchange of win95 and other unsupported software), or continue to support it.
The Terms of purchase likely failed to include MS reserves the right to terminate the usefullness of this software at time of its choosing.
Lud, lud luddites. Luddites, unite. We all love the flat file.
Even when it grows to be 349Kbytes in size.
yep. wunnerful. simply wunnerful.
How the hell do I edit a registry with vi? And everybody knows vi is the only took I should ever learn how to use. I lernt it back in the day and I'm not gonna learn anything new. Nope. Not for me.
Now where is that sledge hammer. There's a loom out there that needs smashing.
Does anyone konw the installion base for Windows95? I am pretty sure most consumers had switch because they get new OS when they upgrade. But what about the corporate and education markets. My school still run Win95 across their network..
kawai
Microsoft has already announced they will be end-of-lifing all previous versions of windows once .net comes out.
when the automotive industry was only 20 years or so old combustion engines DID double in efficiency every 18 months or so. Especially Fords.
You knew that the first GM product, the Cadillac, was desinged by Henry Ford, didn't you?
And Chevrolet isn't even American. The Chevrolet Brothers were Swiss.
KFG
Within the last year at our facility we installed close to twenty PCs running MS-DOS on a Novell network. Why? Because for the applications we were running (real-time process control, written in-house) DOS provides solid, reliable execution, extremely fast reboots when necessary, not a lot of OS and GUI overhead, and mouse-free user interaction (see! my fingers never leave my hands). And this was developed relatively recently (NT 3.5 and 98 were both available at the time) so it's not like DOS was all they had to work with. We even installed a system with an application that runs under OS/2 2.1! They needed something that would multitask, and at the time the application was developed, Windows just wasn't up to it. It works, so why change it?
I don't mind that M$ has dropped DOS. Good riddance. There's always IBM PC-DOS and DR-DOS which I guess is now GPL, right? I begrudgingly paid for several copies of MS-DOS that I would rather not have had to do, because the software guys said that's what they needed.
I predicted this in 85, MS will become apple and close the box and apple will become MS and open the box. (MS's box was extremely open in 1985).
as for all the comments about xp being a disk hog, win3.1 took up nearly a quarter of my 40meg hard drive. now that 40gig hard drives are the standard this equates to windows xp taking about a 90% less install size to disk size ratio than 3.1 used to.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
So unless you've got some fanatical love for dos games, theres really no reason not to upgrade.
-
unless you are a MacOS freak who thinks that running Office 98 on MacOS really is "Thinking Different"
Is this a troll or do you really mean it? Office 98 has since been supplanted by Office 2001, and now just a few weeks ago by Office X for OS X. It would seem you need to either get your head screwed on straight or check your facts prior to posting.
This is informative. Mod it up. Meta-mod down the Mod'r.
Thank you.
Lud, lud luddites. Luddites, unite. We all love the flat file.
Even when it grows to be 349Kbytes in size.
Um, so whats the registry if not a huge binary file? Oh, except the registry includes configuration settings for every single part of the Operating System and installed components. But wait! That would mean that the registry is shock! A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE! Oh my, well I never. No no, please, give me one file that can become easily corrupted instead of lots of smaller files that can become easily corrupted without affecting each other. I mean, that would never do would it?
I must have missed that registration step in my RedHat 7.2 install :)
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
hawk, who doesn't use any mswindows himself
> Windows isn't just an OS. It's an OS plus a set of standard libraries
> and applications
then aren't we supposed to call it "GNU/Windows" ?
:)
hawk
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
No. Copyright law does not work like trademark law.
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware
Software created as a work for hire (including most commercial software) becomes abandonware 95 years after first publication. Relevant case: Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Unlike trademark law, copyright law allows monopoly owners to make implied licenses by refusing to enforce a copyright, and the owner can pull those licenses at any time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
jeez, people. just take the freely available directx api and code and compile a port for windows 95.
oh wait... you mean this is proprietary code? why are you using it in the first place?
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
I think many people consider software to be abandoned when it is no longer available for purchase, and there is no competing product.
Define "competing product." Castlevania for Game Boy Advance competes with eBay'd copies of Castlevania for NES. Heck, Pinobee for Game Boy Advance competes with not only the Sonic series but also every side-scrolling platform game ever released on any platform.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You whine about DirectX 8.1 with 95, but you know nothing. I have been abandoned worse than this! I have an SiS motherboard with built in video, and SiS decided to stop making drivers for it, and the current drivers are incompatible with DirectX 8, but heaven forbid they should tell you that... I had to find some hack someone had made to uninstall directx 8 so I could put 7 back on. The lesson? Don't buy from shit companies who will abandon you in a few years...
i would have a tough time believing that. such 'compatability layers' are what made win98 and the like unstable, still relying on dos tech.
-
There was a thing on MS's site a few months ago that said SP7 was scrapped as to not introduce any more bugs... they felt SP6a was very stable, and didn't want to make people upgrade and possibly cause problems.
Grr. Damn AC... forgot my password.
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
When this happens with Windows XP, you will no longer be able to change parts in an old computer, because doing so would require re-activation, which Microsoft won't make available after a date the company picks. This is a way of forcing users to pay more, not only for software, but for hardware, too. (Microsoft's big customers are hardware manufacturers.)
I do not think that Microsoft will do this. Many of the XP sales are over the counter, which means there is no true licence. They are _sales_, like soap or a hammer. Refusal to activate would make it worthwhile for a number of lawyers to start class action lawsuits which would even go so far as to challenge the viability of shrinkwrap EULAs. The customer bought the right to use the software. As long as Microsoft is a company, they must honor the sale.
Wait, you have a high end CAD workstation and you are running it with IDE drives? Sorry, that is not highend, that is more like midrange.
;) )
Also, what filesystem are you using? If you are using FAT32, then upgrade to NTFS. The journaling filesystem WILL prevent these types of errors from occuring. It is the same thing if you use Reiser or XFS on Linux.
Also, would you happen to be using a promise controller on your system. I have only ever experienced issues like this with these devices. (Even with NTFS because of the way that Promise cards seem to work; or not work
As a sysadmin, it's a pain in the butt to keep everybody's computers running normally. Frankly, not only am I a big fan of everybody in the office having the SAME OS, also I am a fan of everybody having the MOST SUPPORTED OS.
Today, that is Windows 2000. Nearly everybody here is running 2000, and it's great. It's easy to maintain. I will give you an example: the network shared laser printer. It's really easy to set up in Win2K. Go to the computer controlling the printer, add the printer, and then hit 'OK'.
Then we've got a Win95 box that also needed to share the printer.... oh dear. I won't bore you with specifics, but I had to go download stuff from HP and reboot once. All this so somebody could print on an ancient machine.
With 95 being blown away, it makes it easier for me to tell the higher-ups that we need to put some $$ into the latest OS. "I could have had this employee up and running in under a minute, instead of 20" sometimes works, but this works even better "Well, I can't get Windows 95 anymore so I'll have to get their new OS." They won't know the difference, but I will since I'm supporting it.
"Derp de derp."
If you don't like Microsoft, don't user their products. Don't bitch about the registry if you use Windows, there is nothing you can do about it. Futhermore I have never had a registry problem i couldn't fix either with scanreg, by hand in the regedit or with a personal registry backup. Let Microsoft shoot themselves in the foot. When they do it people will be looking for alternatives and here is Linux to the rescue.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Strikes again.
Might I add that there is no technical reason I can think of to discontine Win95 support.
I can think of lots of applications and software I will still be using under Win95 even when the Win98 deadline comes AT THE TIME I bought Windows 95 and the computer it runs on.
The only possible reason why I can think of, that Microsoft wants to dump 95 is that it can juice more cash out of a user base that will not benefit one iota, and quite possibly break all of thier software when they do upgrade to XP.
The enourmous costs of using XP or even 2000 if you consider a company or person still has 95, with just upgrading the hardware can be a deterrant itself.
One of the strengths of Linux is, at this very moment, the same commercial distro you buy, or even kernel you install, will run on a 486 machine no problemo.
True, but so will the app software.
Think about that for a moment.
I can still run a 1995 version of some astronomy software on any distro back till then, and it won't change any time soon.
Can I still run my App on win95 now that Microsoft won't sell the OS, support the OS?
I highly doubt my app, or in this instance Total Annihilation, will run on XP. Haven't tried it though, but I bet it wouldn't.
So not only do you need a new machine, new os, you need new application software.
This tiresome and very lucrative business model Microsoft has forced on corporate America is not a requirement, technically, to insure "innovation" moves forward.
Another argument furthered by Microsoft, in that in order for "innovation" to move forward you must replace your OS and apps and hardware within a few years of a release of our OS or we will not provide you with new fixes is also tiresome.
This simply doesn't happen in the UNIX world. I have tons of apps in the early 90's I am happily still running on Apollo hardware at the moment.
I can point to very few Windows apps that do this.
So my point is this is a scam. When are people going to wake up and stop spending untold millions every 2 year microsoft release cycle for what amounts to be diminishing returns and higher prices from Microsoft.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Not on Win2k. The registry lies in winnt/system32/config, and the registry files cannot be touched when Win2k is running. The only way I've found to make a backup out of the box is to run ntbackup.exe and backup the entire system state (220MB), but hey, it works.
Remember, Microsoft, must maintain it's growth rate in order to maintain its stock valuation. It's stock valuation is the basis of much of it's employee compenstation, etc.
Bill Gates, today, might be saying that you'll be able to use the software forever, but 5 years down the road when they are clawing for ways to keep the company growing, they may reconsider that policy.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
A milder form of product activation is already in place. I am to give a talk with my laptop, the AV person plugs in a USB mouse connected to the projector thingy, and the message pops up to insert the Win98SE disk, which is sitting at home 800 miles away, and the place I am giving the presentation is a Windows 2000 shop with nary a Win98SE disk to be had. I'm hosed.
A minor annoyance (I had to have someone work an ordinary mouse from the back of the room), but an annoyance anyway, and I am sure this asking for the disk has more to do with cutting down copying (even a little bit) than saving on disk space.
>> There you have it from the man himself. "Once you buy it, you have the right to use it forever."
This is an strikingly disingenuous quote from a man who has gone to great lengths to emphasize that when you purchase Windows you are buying, not software, but the license to use it.
They've made quite clear that Micros~1 is shifting its focus from selling applications to selling *service*. In other words, you are not buying anything, you are renting -- and have the right to use it as long as you continue to pay up.
It's like saying, "Once you buy a satellite dish, you have the right to use it forever". Sure, you do. But unless you pay for the service, all the dish does is hang off the side of your house.
The notion that software companies lose money on piracy is a bunch of crap I suspect. I grant you, if there was rampant Chinese grade piracy they would certainly be burdened. When they price their software, they base it on how many copies they can sell, what will price people out of the market, etc. In that calculation they are accomodating for the fact that some copies will be made illegally.
When fighting priacy they suggest that they are doing good for consumers. That if all those evil pirates would cough up the money they owe Microsoft, the price could be lower on the software. If that theory was accurate, then logically wouldn't we expect the average price for their operating system to drop in its newest release? I mean if it prevents piracy, they sell more copies, therefore the price should be correspondingly lower, non? But it isn't.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
My Windows95's lifecycle draws to a close at least once a week. Windows98, once every other day.
Nice revisionist history you're writing there, partner. As someone who was bitten on the ass by that multiple times, I can tell you the solution to my problem: flashing my VIA's BIOS to a more recent rev. You can either do that or you can disable ACPI. Microsoft never released a fix for it because they never had a bug of their own to begin with; it was VIA's fault through and through.
FWIW, after one of these corruptions (hasn't happened since the BIOS flash) I rolled back my registry and Office 2K didn't complain one bit about it. Go figure.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I guess theres still NT4 workstation with the ability to exclude Internet Explorer. Wish I could get win2kpro without IE, it might actually run at a decent pace without it. Too bad for MS, they seem to be in the business of giving everyone exactly what they don't want. I will be glad to see them get put into their place and actually be forced to make something that consumers want, instead of somehting consumers have to have becuase MS integrated their next new completely proprietary gizmo into their OS.
Highend CAD stations don't use much disk bandwidth. Optimize for the task, otherwise you're just throwing money away.
These are errors in the CONTENTS of files (the registry to be precise). Journalling metadata changes like NTFS, Reiser and XFS won't help you at all here. Doing full data journalling is painfully slow, and also doesn't especially help, because the filesystem layer just gets write requests, it has no idea how the application groups them into atomic changes.
According to our company's MS contact (we do a lot of windows backup stuff), the API for backing up the windows registry DOES NOT WORK. Microsoft has stated they have NO PLANS TO FIX IT.
The only solution for a complete system backup is to backup all files, and dump the registry to a text file. When you restore the file, import the text file back into the system with regedit.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
Debian makes you do the changes yourself with fdisk during the install process. So if you blew away your partitions, most likely its because you chose to. Try aruging that the install process is too complicated for newbies, at least then you'll have a point.
What happens if there is no outbound link, will Win or Office XP keep retrying until the link can be established?
See my journal, I write things there
If this is true -- and it might be -- the remedy would be for all holders of the license to use XP to bring a class action for breach against MS. I do not run XP, and I have not reviewed its license agreement, but if MS has warranted that it will reactivate copies of XP in order to permit upgrades to hardware, then denying the use of XP after a planned obsolesence would breach the license.
Of course, the damages for breach of the license would be very small. And it is a dicier question whether such a planned obsolesence would support a cause of action with better damages -- e.g., unfair trade practice, antitrust, etc.
Ah, y'see, I have an odd perspective around here. Being a professional software developer, I appreciate that if you don't pay people for their stuff and rip them off, their bills don't get paid and their kids go hungry. I therefore believe in actually paying the asking price for something if you want it.
I have absolutely nothing against free (as in beer) software, if that is the choice of the person or people who wrote it. I think shareware was, and still is, a fabulous idea. But I think if you want, say, Win98, and you rip it off instead of paying for it, you're a thief, pure and simple.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Speak for yourself. My parents computer running Windows Me boots up into a message that says something like "The registry is corrupted. Click OKAY to fix registry and reboot the computer." When it finishes rebooting it shows the same message. There is no cancel or close box on the dialog.
I was overjoyed to find that my parents had figured out what to do. When the computer starts up, the first thing you do is hit C-M-Del, and force quit the Registry Fixer. Cool!
How dare you. People have spent hundreds of pounds upgrading to 95, 98, 98SE and ME. And now you're telling them they're all shit and they have to fork out AGAIN for a newer version that isn't shit?
No wonder so many people hate Microsoft.
I always thought it funny, hilarious even, that Mac users bash one monopoly (MS) and jump into another (Apple). Open-standards hardware forever! And I run a open-standard OS, too.
(Running a Mac with Linux is just as bad as running a PC with Windows.)
Zodiac Survey
Good point. I'd never expect M$ software just to keep working or anything. I've got a nice new W2k box on my desk, but the year 2000 is almost two years ago. I don't have anything that old on any of my linux boxes. I'd better update my system fast, there's no telling what kind of exploitable holes the script kiddies have by now. Have to run command.com to get a prompt, but here we go:
Microsoft(R) Windows DOS
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1990-1999.
me thinks, "yikes it's older than I thought!"
H:\>apt-get update
'APT-GET' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
H:\>man apt
'MAN' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
Dude this sucks, I suppose I'll have to do what Billy G wants and buy a boxed set, but I'm kind of scared. Someone told me that upgrades are seledom lossless, and that most of my old software would be broken in subtle ways. Can anyone help my employer? This is terrible.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Wish they would do the same for XP
When you get back to Earth let me know. I'd like to smack you for being such a moron.
"First, despite what you may think of Microsoft, I think we can agree that comparing their "abuses" to human rights abuses is hardly fair. Microsoft bundling WMP7 with XP is hardly on a scale with bombing innocent Afghans or denying women the ability to travel freely."
I am not comparing the degree here. You cannot call bunk on something just because you are not witnessing them first hand. That is not indicative of that fact that said things are not happening to others.
"Second, you're complaining that the third party developers shouldn't be able to code things that can bring down the whole system... so you're saying that you want MS to close their operating system even more? You want the only software with access to any kind of computing power to be MS software? "
Hardly. By simply using the exposed api, the developer can crash a system outside of system level processes/space. That is laughable. Firstly, MS does not publish the api's their own developers use 100% of the time. Secondly, when these api specifications are published, it is usually after the api has already been changed. Thirdly, by this time MS already has a piece of software leading that particular market segment.
Good point. I'd never expect M$ software just to keep working or anything.
See, you're working under the assumption that they worked well in the first place, which we all know is not exactly true. My point is that 2K is better than 95.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
they are nothing but scams.
The windows command shell is a lot more powerful than command.com. You might give it a try sometime if you use that W2K box for anything other than games.
I don't understand why you think IE is the cause of it slowing down. That's kind of silly to imagine because IE is not a running process on the machine.
There probably are some things that run slower on Win2k, wouldn't surprise me a whole lot. However, Win2k is a far superior OS to Win95 by any stretch of the imagination. I wonder how many people had to reboot because Netscape crashed on Win95. I know that was a daily occurance with me when I first started cruising the web. I never have that problem on Win2k today.
I'll happily trade a small percentage of speed for a great improvement in stability any day.
"Derp de derp."
Right now I keep a MS98 partition so I can play games...
When the day comes that I can no longer pick up a game I want to play and run it on Windows 98 is the day I wipe that partition for good.
By that time (apparently 2003) a lot will have changed on the face of Linux...for the better.
I'll scratch that itch of mine and ramp up my game development on the Linux platform.
I always thought it funny, hilarious even, that Sun users bash one monopoly (MS) and jump into another (Sun). Open-standards hardware forever! And I run a open-standard OS, too. (Running a Sun with Linux is just as bad as running a PC with Windows.)
That is so clueless, but to be expected from a cable troll. It's not about sucking down adverts and consuming, it's about expression and sharing. It's too bad cable companies block incoming port 80 and mail, as a set top box could easily be set up to run web, ftp, mail and instant messenger clients. That way, people could share the information they want with their friends. Wedding photos, hobbies, literature, all sorts of nice stuff without Pepsi adverts stuck on them, wow. My 486 does as much.
I've experienced this first hand with "Why is the internet so slow?" check the settings, and the person has 8MB o RAM running w95 and someone gave them a CD with I.E. 5.x and somehow they got the thing to kinda run. By the time they have to go out and get SIMMS enough to run the browser du jour (Opera notwithstanding) they might as well go out and get a whole new system for $700 USD.
Really, you should be a little nicer. Why would anyone throw out their $1,000 system that came loaded with software that prommised them the moon? They have every right to expect what they were told is true. Your company has told a few tall ones too! Who knows, the spy ware you installed might be the problem, as it enabled some script kiddie to bust right into it. The problem is not the machine, it's the software. What are you doing to help them out? Telling them to buy another pack of lies, that's what. No amount of tweeking will make an M$ crippled box secure, fast, dependable or lasting. Get off your leet horse, act honest and quit serving people who want to screw everyone.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...there are still a lot of devices that have no Windows 2000 drivers. I'll have to buy a new video card.I'll have to buy a new DVD player and decoder card. My USB webcam will no longer work.
I've seen plenty of drivers left in beta for well over a year. And they're in beta because they're highly unstable.
Windows 2000 is not worth the money I'd spend in new hardware. I'll stick with 98SE..the PC rarely gets used anyway.
I almost like win2k, but the video/sound performance is inferior to the win9x code base. Of course 2k does not crash every 2 hours either. :(
My UT framerates drop 10 -15 on the same hardware under 2000
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Hey, Microsoft told me in the Windows 95 install script that "Everything you want to do, and more, is now possible". Why would I *ever* upgrade?
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
the big auto makers wanted people to have to buy new cars, so they made new 'unleaded only' models.
How much better is Energy Star support in XP over 95?
Shut me down!
Whoa! Shut me down!
I always stop...
always stop...
always always always stop...
Yuh made some grown men cri-e-y!
Yuh made some grown men cri-e-y!
Now restart, now registry...
It's a wonder it could ever -- ever -- beeeeeeee!
( Ahhhh... the end of an era of Microsoft-inspired angst... and the beginning of a new one...)
How is it really "thinking different"? Windows does have Office XP you know.
Still, neither version of Office can touch Gobe Productive (which will be for BeOS, Linux and Windows).
I didn't see anything else in the comments section about this (although, as usual, the S/N was low, the density was high, and I allotted myself under 2 minutes to skim it all..). It just seems that this, in addition to being rather nasty of MS (maybe), is also kind of stupid that they don't even know there own plans well enough to inform their developers...
Now they're eliminating a large part of their support funds as WELL as forcing people to seek an alternative. Who says that alternative has to be Microsoft? They're at the point where they're going to an unfamiliar OS anyways.
Microsoft should have held onto its "being first" advantage. This is essentially tossing that away. In my opinion, not worth it at all, bad marketing decision.
I, personally, use Win98SE for gaming, simply because I find it to be the most stable Win9x platform, and the Win9x platforms are best for gaming. I wouldn't use WinME because its garbage and WinXP because its built for toddlers. I sure as hell hope there's a UNIX gaming alternative when Win98 support disappears, because if there is, I think this will be a HUGE opportunity for UNIX (Linux, whatever) to swoop in.
Magius_AR
Depends on how you look at this. 99% of windows 98 SE were just stability and other OS enhancements. We shouldn't have to pay to have software bugs fixed. We shouldn't have had to pay for win98 SE. As for most of the other versions of windows, your statement pretty much applies. Especially with regards to windows 2000. Which is still the best version of windows.
I tried XP and hated how all these microsoft only services kept nagging me to do their shit. Since all I use my Windows computer to do is use office, SSH (GO PuYYy!) into various Unix boxes, listen to mp3s, and play UT one in awhile Windows 2000 does exactly what is is supposed to.
Yeah, the registry can be backed up. Fine.
But does anybody else think it's strange that *applications* are capable of taking down an *OS*? Shouldn't a good OS be immune to damage caused by a 'bad' IM client or screensaver?
Could you remotely log into your DOS/Windows 3.* machine while someone else uses the console? No? Cause you can do that in Windows XP. Out of the box. Can you run your system on a very fast, robust, journaling filesystem? Cause NTFS is pretty damn good. Does DOS/16-bit Windows have an SMP kernel? Does it support proper memory protection? Threads? No? Thought not.
/like/ Windows, less so Microsoft and their business practices, but to claim it's the same as DOS is straight up trollish pig-ignorance. It's like claiming that all the advances in Unix since AT&T are meaningless fluff.
I don't particularly
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Or if they at least used a text format - INI style, XML hierarchical, or SOMETHING. Something besides a binary format that tends to get corrupted (and sufficient corruption still will make a Windows box unbootable, registry fixer or no - even with systems with the registry fixing tools, it STILL happens.
At least with a text file, if it got fucked up, you could go in with any old text editor and fix the problem.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
At the moment I'm running IE4, 5 and 6 concurrently
How can you have multiple versions of IE installed on the same computer? That would make my job MUCH easier!
cpeterso
Since 98SE is sorta like Win99, why would MS terminate support at the same time? Even 98 users had to pay a relatively small amount to get the SE upgrade.
Yes, people used to run BBS.
Cause you can do that in Windows XP. Out of the box.
Wow, I'm impressed. I'm told they included a bare naked telnet server, whooo hoooo! This is almost as cool as running one of those stupid remote access programs that burns up so much bandwith and processor that it's worthless. I suppose someone might set up ssh and secure shell via citrix, but they could have done the same under win3.1. Can you run your system on a very fast, robust, journaling filesystem? Cause NTFS is pretty damn good.
Yeah, IBM did think regular FAT was limited, but I'm talking about the OS not the file system under it. With enough work a DOS box can write to whatever media you want.
Does DOS/16-bit Windows have an SMP kernel? Does it support proper memory protection? Threads? No? Thought not.
These things are meaningless to the avererage M$ user. You must be some kind of Linux zelot talking all that tech/marketroid trash. Sometimes, I wish NT supported proper memory protection, UIDs and PIDs. When I really feel like that, I install a real OS.
It's a programable machine dude. People have been making them do all sorts of tricks for a long time. M$ has not, and still does not. Such a shame, it's so lame, you suck turd and nanny-nanny boo-boo, you just told me all about how M$ has sucked in the past.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
i'll give you an example. i had installed a plug and play network card that i had mistakenly thought was an ne2000 compatible on an windows 98 machine. so when i picked the driver at the plug and play prompt it told me that it couldn't find an ne2000. fine. so i open up the box and find that it's a d-link. i download the driver from another machine so i can install it on the other box. come to find out plug and play isn't detecting a nic anymore. i try installing it manually still doesn't recognize the nic. i end up going through the registry and finding that even though it told me it wasn't installing the ne2000, it reserved an irq entry for it!!! i delete and plug and play picks it up fine on reboot. now, i know to do this but what about the poor sap that picks the wrong card by mistake?? keep in mind that the adapter didn't show in network devices either so for all the user knows, the installation was cancelled because that's what windows told him. this is why the registry is such a pain in the ass! this type of thing happens consistently in win 9x. i usually try to avoid
Short of legal intervention, the w95 code will never ever see the light of day.
Work is a big game anyway.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Just because Windows 95 is unsupported doesn't mean the lamers will stop calling you for help with Windows 95.
"That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable"
And herein lies the BIGGEST problem in capitalism. A company should not be responsible to it's shareholders in any other way than simple honesty. Honestly market an honest product. No more, no less. This shit that's going on now is a prime example:
Do whatever you can get away with, within the limits of the law, no matter how unethical it may be.
And this "you're responsible for making profits for the shareholders at any cost" crap is the cause of it. It's forcing companies to act unethically, or get sued by greedy shareholders.
When you invest in a company, you are TAKING A RISK, just like betting on the horses. If that company buckles in a year, oh well. However, laws should remain that prevent a company from going public, grabbing as much shareholder money as they can, then the CEO buggering off with it all and screwing everyone.
Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003.
The emperor Penguin does not share your optimistic apraisal.
But, the wordpad in Windows 2000 used the Word 97/2000 format. So taking that ability away in WinXP makes no sense at all.
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I have a 3.11 machine (a 386 with a 20MB HD). I use it on occasion to do word processing. It boots WP 5.1 faster than most of my other computers boot, period :)
It works okay.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I'm sorry, but why don't you go invest money in a business (buy stock), and then see if you're happy that they're being "honest" while their stock plummets because they're not making any money? Oh, what's that? You wouldn't invest your money in such a company? Imagine that! Or, maybe you would invest your money in such a company. Luckily, capitalism has this nifty Darwin-esque "survival of the fittest" type of culture, wherein not only would your "honest" company not survive, you yourself would also be flat broke and not able to fund any other silly experiments in altruism.
Let's reword that. How about, "Do what you must to make a profit, because without a profit you won't be doing anything shortly." The law is there to put limits on such behavior. "Ethics" has nothing to do with it until you get busted. Such is life.
That's fine. If a company doesn't wish to be "enslaved" by their shareholders, they can simply stay private. There's nothing that says that all business must be pulbicly traded. Good luck surviving, though, when you have no venture capital and you sell no product because you're being "honest".
Damn right you're taking a risk. And unlike when you bet on horses at the track, or drop chips at the blackjack table, you actually expect the businesses you're taking a risk on to attempt to maximize the value of your investment. Why would you "take a risk" on a sure-loss investment? Seems stupid to me. Oh, yeah, and there are laws that prevent a company from going public, grabbing VC, and skipping off to Mexico. That CEO would be guilty of embezzlement. Of course, there's nothing stopping the entire company from throwing $50million parties with their $60million in venture capital for the year. That's not illegal, just stupid. And if you're stupid enough to invest in such a company, well ...
It's all about the shareholders. Most of them don't have $70B up their sleeves. The more money MSFT pulls in, the more goes into shareholders' pockets. And besides, Gates is not CEO anymore - he's the 'chief software architect' ... playing CEO is Steve Ballmer's job.
I have tried to buy a new Win98 CD (UK version).
...
I have been calling with Microsoft for it because we still have licenses for Win95 and Win98 though the CD has been broken.
Microsoft "suggested" to upgrade because they do not do Win98 CD's anymore. They even tried to push us on a very unprofessional way to upgrade because it "would be better". (as if)
The nightmare goes even further when I tried to BUY a official Win98 (SE) UK edition. I have found it after calling 17 different computer stores in Belgium and Holland.
So, Now I have found a official Windows98 (SE) with nifty holographic sticker on the CD, and won't be able to buy another one or I'll have to search again.
This will not only be a problem for Win98, though WinNT, 2000 and other products will also dissapear the same way; In short
You will be forced to use Windows (e)XP(iration date) because you will not be able to buy a official previous version anymore.
Not this only will be bad, but when Microsoft will only support their eXPire model, Windows95/98/2000 applications will not be made anymore because of lack of support from its own maker.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
This means my parents bought a brand-new Windows XP computer JUST IN TIME!
And no stupid activation issues, because theirs was pre-activated! Lucky them!
You do realize that the activation feature is a conspiracy between Microsoft and PC makers to make it more difficult for those who actually want to build and/or maintain their own computer for less, right?
If the OS is out of date, your PC probably is too! Time to buy a new one!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
In the real world, I agree that what you have said holds true. I don't think it is absolutely certain, but I don't know any counter-examples.
What you didn't mention is that the abusiveness is self-destructive. When IBM first sold PCs, they had 100% of the market. When there began to be alternatives, IBM's share of the market dropped to 8%, and eventually to nothing. I was amazed back then. People who knew little about computers knew they didn't like IBM! All the articles in newspapers and magazines managed to convey the nature of IBM management back then even to people with no technical knowledge.
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
""Norton Systemworks with cleansweep and other such registry-wreckers and watch your registry operate on its own just fine."
Thanks for the tip about Norton. I didn't know that. Considering my experiences with Symantec, it is very easy to believe.
I also didn't know about the outsourcing of Win 95 support. Microsoft didn't mention that. I did suppose there would be many web sites that would continue support.
Bush's education improvements were
where is Service Pack 7?
Google I'm Feeling Lucky says: http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/sp7.asp
And that basically says it's not happening because there's not enough fixes to go in it, even after a really long time. Of course, there's a post-SP6a "Security Rollup Package" and everything else that would be availble in SP7 is for download (and conveniently linked to off that page). And to top it all off "Microsoft intends to continue supporting customers by making hotfixes available as they are needed. "
But really, I think Microsoft probably has more of a pressing need to support NT 4 than Win95. Businesses run NT4, and they care more than Joe Schmoe surfing the web at home...
What is new is that, even if you have the key, you must have Microsoft's support if you want to change hardware.
Bush's education improvements were
10 years from now, Win95 and Pentium 133 Mhz and Doom, Quake will sell for a fortune. Yes, that's true, people are willing to buy old computer that bring back their memory of using them when they are young.
Look at how many people speak fondly for DOS and Intel 8088 computer and older games. You might gain a fortune if you keep your old Pentium 133 and Win95 for 10 years.
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
They are hardly killing them or causing you to stop using them, but if you want to run latest software then yes you'll need to upgrade your OS. Same goes for any OS, I don't see a lot of complaints that no one has backported USB, LVM, etc, to Linux 1.3 (same age as Windows 95) Don't want to upgrade, fine, just don't plan on being able to use newer software on an older OS.
This is different. With Windows XP, you cannot change the HARDWARE without support from Microsoft.
Bush's education improvements were
Amen. I don't see how people see this whole process as acceptable - Microsoft sells them a product, which they (theoretically) expect to perform some task. It does the task - more or less. Except for the crashes, the incompatibility, and some assorted flakiness. But it doesn't have some specific feature. So then, Microsoft comes out with a new product, which you must then pay for again. And people do it - shelling out hundreds of dollars for the latest Microsoft bloatware, to get what they thought they had already - a system that would meet their needs.
How is it that some people are so eager to spend perfectly good money re-buying what they're supposed to already have, anyway? What a racket.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Now, don't mislabel me as a Microsoft sympathizer. There is certainly lots of room for improvement in their products. However, don't blame Microsoft for providing a tool that's misused by others.
The registry performs the function of copy-protection. A good operating system, one that was made in the customer's interests, would not mix information from one program with another, because then one bad program can cause others to fail.
The registry is poorly implemented. That is another reason for problems. For example, it often has errors that cannot be repaired with the tools Microsoft provides.
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Well there are two ways for errors to creep into the database,
1) Incorrect data gets written to the registry.
Well if this individual is using a CAD system, then more than likely he is running NT or a variant of it (2K or XP). The NT registry itself is journaled and takes many steps to prevent any kind of corruption. Turning the machine off in the middle of a write for example will just prevent the registry entry from being written and it would be cleaned up on next reboot. This is not the problem.
2) the actual write to the registry is in itself cached in a manner that the OS does not know about it (cache on a RAID controller as an example). If that cache is not set to write through, then if a machine is shut down and that cache has not been properly written and corruption occurs. Journaled or non journaled file system is not relevent here. And if you are using NTFS, then it is journaled. You have no option. FAT32 on the other hand is horribly inefficient at most operations. And for a non journalled file system, it is odd that it is much slower than FAT32 on volumes larger than 9G in size. hmmmmm... guess that journalling is a big performance hit.
What really sucks is when it won't boot when there is no network connection, even though you give it a static IP address and don't have it looking for any other machines...
At least linux boots and says "Cable problem?"
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Depends on your definition of "better". It has TEN TIMES the footprint of Win95, yet it's doesn't do 10x as much as 95 by a longshot. Plus it's WAY slower for most thing. Everything from games, to just clicking on 'My^H^H Bill's Computer'
I'll have to try that.
cpeterso
It is not, however, infallable
When and if the Pope endorses any OS, We'll let you know.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Depends on how you look at this. 99% of windows 98 SE were just stability and other OS enhancements. We shouldn't have to pay to have software bugs fixed.
And when SE was released, Microsoft's "Windows Update" site pointed out which updates would provide the functional equivalent of SE, with the exception of a couple of features like "Internet Connection Sharing," which is not a bug fix.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
ah, but if you owned windows 98...you didn't have that...
> Pick one or the other -- either you're talking
> about win9x and the weak security argument holds
> up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions
> of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but
> not both.
Ok, I will pick NT and 2000. Take a look at the password security. Passwords are encoded in seven letter chunks. By default, these passwords are sent across the network, where it is extremely easy to decode them. Even if you set it to the highest security, the seven letter restriction still applies, and the passwords are still stored in the LM format, so if you want to crack them, you don't have to bother with the "high security" hashes, since the practically plaintext versions are sitting right there.
And, if you want to connect to any win95/98/etc computer, you need to leave security on low, and any NT/2000 machine cannot connect either, until it is upgraded as well.
Horrible security, whether you are talking about 95 or NT.
Uhhh did you forget about Windows Update? Thats where a good majority of updates are available. And as far as the less than public patches, looking around on their FTP site reveals most of them, or else trying catchup.cnet.com works great, and has worked for about the past year and a half for me. I cant speak for the NT availability however, I use Linux faithfully.
(I know I'm late to the table on this discussion, but hey, I've got a life to live.)
Anyway, XP is for toddlers? Says who? XP is far and away the best PC OS I have used for gaming. Why? Because the damn games aren't crashing my machine. The only real caveat is that many DOS games won't run under XP. Other than that, I've had no problems. Also, your toddler observation might be based on the new GUI features. Just turn them off if you don't like them. None of them are required fare.
None.
Zilch.
And it performs well.
Try it; you might like it *gasp*.
Oh.. and MS's strategy *is* risky. In recent history though, they have a tendency to "bet the farm" on their next step. Each step is calculated to be somewhat risky to allow real progress, but not so risky that it would be "game over" for them. Really, it's quite well thought out and effective I think.
Now, if they would just dump the stupid product activation in XP, Office, and everything else going forward. I really hate it because it doesn't do what they say it will do (limit piracy), but it does/could do some things they won't ever own up to (like invade my privacy, create a pain in the butt situation for my customers, etc.).
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
That would be JES-OS. I keep hearing the Southern preachers talk about it.
Well I dunno about the rest of you, but I usually use something until I can't use it anymore. Not that I'm a win95 user. It was way too buggy for my tastes.
But I do know a lot of people who still run it. I mean, you're not going to get win98 working too great on your 486, are you? and yes, there are MANY people who still run 486's!!
Not everyone can afford the lastest and greatest in computers. Heck, my fastest system here is a 166 Mhz Pentium, non mmx. I can't afford anything else right now.
So as Microsoft washes its hands of win95, it still lives. And will live for many years to come. I know I'm still ticked that they dropped support for DOS and Windows 3.1 LOL
And yes, I do still use DOS and Windows 3.1, not on my primary system, but I have uses for them.
Why upgrade because Microsoft tells us to? Or Intel and AMD for that matter? Personally I wouldn't mind having a faster system, but really I'm able to do just about everything I need to with my old 166 Mhz system.
I think people just get sucked into the faster is better thing. Before this system, I ran a 486sx25 for six years. And I suspect my next upgrade will last at least six to seven years.
I also still have 386's I use around here running OS/2 2.1, which by the way still works pretty well. Who would have thought an almost nine year old OS would be nearly uncrashable? I haven't had 2.1 crash in four years!!! I've had uptimes in excess of 85 days!
So I say long live the old opertating systems and hardware! Nothing is obsolete as long as you have a use for it!
no. although I'm primarily on NetBSD now.
check your speling
this took place quite some time after the partitioning step (which, btw, i always do by hand as well). i think there was a menu which asked me if yaboot should be set up. having used bootX so far (i.e. being unfamiliar with yaboot), and being quite lazy after a satisfying installation, i went for it, and that did the job. never bothered to find out exactly what went wrong, so i guess the blame is on me. then again, your talking i386, i'm talking PPC.
check your speling
I like Windows 2000 as much as the next guy, it is very stable, almost limitlessly configurable, and is relatively easy to configure (particularly during installation). However, Win 9x family members still have their place-- in the homes of those not overly concerned with security, and that don't ask much more of their OS than to start their computer and send the occasional email to grand mama.