Slashdot Mirror
Creaky Operating Systems Form IT Foundations
maotx writes "The Washington Post has an article on how aging operating systems are still widely used. The article states that "The research firm IDC estimates that of the roughly 514 million paid-for copies of Windows on desktops and laptops worldwide at the end of 2004, almost 21 percent were the aging Win 95, 98 and Millennium Edition releases." That equates to around 108 million copies being used."
May god have mercy on the souls of anyone currently running this OS.
Is there any OS more unstable?
My dad runs a 40 employee technology startup [not a computer-related company.]
And he's running Win98 on his PC, along with Firefox and Thunderbird and MS-Office 2000.
Running Win98 isn't a problem for him. I offered to upgrade him, but he wasn't interested. "Why mess with something that works? Why spend the time and money?"
Conclusion: Only upgrade when you're compelled to upgrade.
---
Me: Fedora Core 3, Mac OS X 10.3.
Dad: Win98
Mom: Win2000
Kids: Mac OS X 10.2
Sister: Win2000
Brother-in-Law: WinXP/Home
Girlfriend: WinXP/Home
Grandpa: Casio calculator from the 1970s.
In high school I encountered a 386 with only 4mb of ram running Windows 95. I don't remember all the specs but it seemed to run quite well. I was surprised, since my home machine was a 200mhz pentium w/mmx with 72mb of ram, and also ran Windows 95, with roughly the same level of responsiveness.
" Yes, and lots of older worms won't work on WinXP or 2k."
But the number of those older worms is VASTLY exceeded by the number of new, 2k/xp specific ones. VASTLY.
"Win2k and XP got rid of a lot of problems for people by leaving the 9x series kernel in hell."
They got rid of a few problems but managed to introduce hundreds more.
Have you ever used a patched, upgraded 98se/lite box? I got six months of uptime before the power went out.
I'll make you a deal. You take two boxes, put 98se/lite UNPATCHED on one, and XP UNPATCHED on the other, put 'em both on a broadband internet connection and you tell me which one gets infected inside 15 minutes. Hint: it won't be 98se/lite.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I answered a bunch of questions--er, complaints--from readers in my newsletter after that column ran (which was, um, almost a month ago). In case anybody's curious, here's that link.
We still have an old Digital AlphaServer 1000A 4/233 that we still use as a File/Print Server, so not only a creaky OS but on a dead chip ;). I still use it to surf the web with sites I don't trust and check out what I think are dodgy emails on it as it dosn't run Intel Code and ActiveX so I feel safer than doing it on one of the Wintel Boxes.
Jonathan
You haven't seen speed until you upgrade this baby with 512 MB of RAM. Yes, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 can take advantage of 512 MB of RAM over DOS 7.1 (the guts of Windows 95B through 98SE.) The trick is to patch the IO.SYS so that you can install older versions of Windows, and then change a line in the SYSTEM.INI file (for systems with over 256 MB of RAM.) I also remove the swap file and use a RAMdisk to tweak performance further, but neither is required. A google search on OSR2fix will give more details.
Use FreeDOS. Free, kept updated wrt security, and IME fully compatible, with the added bonus of being able to access fat32 partitions with no difficulty.
I am trolling
What makes you think any significant fraction of these people would be willing to switch to Linux?
If someone is running 7-10 year old hardware and OS, it means either that what they have does the job and they have no interest in something new, or that they can't afford anything new.
Some number of people in the "can't afford" camp might be *nix candidates, but I'd bet that the huge majority of people simply don't care about computers. They have something that works, they know how to use it, and they aren't looking to complicate their lives.