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Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware
Daniel Iversen writes "Still 95% compatible with Windows XP, The Windows 2000 OS still runs very well on very old hardware - hardware with low specs it was never even meant to run on (tech setup guide - not a review). The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?"
The two points learned from this article:
1) A previous version of Windows, with less bloat, runs better on hardware with less resources to accomodate the bloat of future versions.
2) If you turn off practically everything, it'll use up a whole lot less memory.
Well, anyone with even a shred of common sense regarding computers should already be aware of those facts...so what purpose does the article serve, other than the rather mediocre instructional value?
Just because someone can drag themselves through a decathalon with a broken leg doesn't mean they're going to be fast, effective or ejoy doing so. I don't see Pentium scaling back their development teams because Win2k was a smooth OS that brought life to the unwieldly Win95-capable hardware.
No, but it does impede XP sales.
At work we just bought a rather sizable chunk of Win2K licenses so that we could upgrade older systems from Win98 without taking the performance hit that we were expecting from XP. Plus since I'm more familiar with Win2K than XP, managing the network is easier for me without having to re-learn where they hid all the settings AGAIN.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
Nerds won't have to buy new PCs. People in the mainstream will have to throw their PCs away as they would rather upgrade than spend money on virus removal.
Also, expect some sort of "super-virus" to force everyone to upgrade to the next version of windows. The purpose behind this is to make sure that everyone has DRM enabled(i.e. crippled) computers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Until the hard drive crashed last month I was running Win 2K on this old Fujitsu Lifebook D765X Pentium Laptop. My sig other took the "good" laptop to Nova Scotia, so I travelled to San Francisco with this one.
Although slow, the machine actually ran quite OK, even logging into wireless networks and surfing the 'net. Office '97 ran just dandy, as did everything else that I usually have installed.
Pentium 166, 48 megs RAM. Stable as a rock.
I doubt very much that XP would even install on this machine, but 2K was happy as a clam.
Three Squirrels
Uhh.. yes?
My fastest machine is an AMD Athlon 800Mhz. I dont do the gaming thing very often, and I honestly feel like the machine performs quite sufficiently for me. I have the money to upgrade, but its simply not a priority for me.
The fact that I can do everything I need to (I dont do video editing or photoshop type stuff) without excessive latency makes that 800Mhz quite sufficient.
That being said, I've also avoided going to heavier OS's. I ran W2k for many years, and recently went to XP. Turn off all that eye candy and it performs just as fast.
Hate to say it, but if I were running linux, I'd probably want something with a little more beef, because the eye candy with some of the X.org window managers is accually functional eye candy, and I would make use of it. As it stands, I dont need it.
I'd like to point to Gates Law - which I think Longhorn is specifically designed to achieve: The speed of software halves every 18 months. We've got machines now quite capable of running most everyday purposes. The only way to get people to buy the newest and greatest is to introduce overhead in the OS. Under the guise of "perty!" and "search!" M$ is throwing massive amounts of unnessecary crap into OS overhead. Relational database for filesystem? Completely unnessecary.
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I have some systems exactly like that. A dozen or so PIII-733 systems purchased 5 years ago, running W2K and MS Office. Aside from some increased use of browser based apps and Remote Desktop to a 2003 Server based app, the needs of the users has remained largely unchanged. So why should the hardware all of sudden become "obsolete". Elsewhere in the company where demands are higher, they were all upgraded to P4s throughout last year. Not every office worker needs Photoshop or cares if the lastest 3D game runs on it. They just want to get their job done.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
People like that would be far better off loading Fedora 4, or Umbutu or.....
They would have the same functionality, but with no worries about the BSA coming in with a search warrent and battering ram. More importantly, they wouldn't have to worry about 40,000 viruses making the system useless before they even started working on it.
The would also have a modern, supported operating system, and software to do things like word processing without the need to spend more than the current value of the machine on even more buggy software.
I actually did that last week. Got a machine that was being 'dumped' at the computer store on the corner, loaded FC4 onto it and delivered it to a native elder who doesn't have the money to buy a new machine for himself.
I even gave him an old inkjet printer and enough ink to last him a few years of refills. Now he can surf, write memoires, use email and not have to worry about being 'owned' -- and once he gets cheap broadband, I can even do remote support for him.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.