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The Death of Windows XP
bsk_cw writes "Although many Windows users intend to hold onto their copies of XP until it is pried from their cold, dead fingers, Microsoft fully intends to phase out the OS in favor of Vista. If you're unwilling to move to one of the alternatives, and really don't like Vista, the least you can do is be aware of what's in store. David DeJean offers a rundown on Microsoft's timeline for Windows XP, why the company does things that way, and what you can do about it."
Ha, still using Windows 2000 here.
This will be very satisfying. I've had so many people tell me they absolutely HATE Vista, but they're stuck with it when they bought their new computer. They frequently ask me to put XP on, no matter what it takes (buy it, hack it, put their mothers key on).
Killing XP off finally, while I love the idea of killing Windows will really hurt Microsoft. Since people hate Vista so much, they'll start being more open to other options.
Maybe it'll mean friends and family will be asking me to do more Linux installs. I like those better anyways, they go a lot faster and they don't involve 2 hours of install plus 2 days of Windows Updates.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
31 June 2008, 8:00 AM EST: Nasdaq and NYSE both crash as the big three PC vendors and their suppliers discover nobody's willing to buy a PC any more.
Midmorning Bill and Steve get a call from Ben Bernanke.
Afternoon DHS executes warrants on One Microsoft Way. Attorney general reopens antitrust investigation. Steve gets a call from the IRS regarding the structure of financing for one of his sports teams.
Evening: XP gets a reprieve! We're all friends again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft should recognize the Vista fiasco and then put all the eggs in the Win7 basket.
I can not imagine all corporate users migrating to vista just because MS want so.
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My laptop actually is slower with a standard Ubuntu install than with Vista...
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
I have Vista installed on my PC. When I bought a new hard drive, I found out that I could not simply activate Vista on my PC (with all the same hardware as before, except the drive itself). I reluctantly called Microsoft support, who asked me for a 25 character (from memory) code, and then read me out another 25 character code which I had to enter to activate Vista.
Wow. Just for changing my hard drive.
I fully intend to downgrade to XP in the near future.
-JB
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
Why not? Generally the reasons that people use Windows when they know there is Linux is because of legacy apps, if they don't work in Vista there is no need to move from XP and not move to Linux/OS X. On most other OSes unless there has been a major change (Like 9X to NT, major changes in scripting languages such as python, PPC to x86) you should expect backwards compatibility. With Linux you don't have that problem, most apps written 3 years ago for the first Ubuntu will work fine with 8.04 or any other distro. With OS X the OS had such a major change from PPC classic mac based to x86 Unix-based you can't make a claim of backwards compatibility but in general there's no reason to expect that NT X App shouldn't run on NT X+1. MS killing backwards compatibility is killing the entire MS monopoly and moving people to OS X or Linux.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
There's plenty of good reasons to bash microsoft; this isn't one of them.
---Dedicated Ubuntu user
Unless MS is really going to *sell* users on Vista, trying to force them off XP is going to represent an opportunity for someone else, among them:
(1) Microsoft Systems shops that have the ability to provide support or
(2) Competition that's open source ("Don't like being moved off your platform when your *vendor* decides it's time, not when you decide it's time? When you have the source, you can maintain or hire someone to maintain it as long as the cost is worth it to you.")
Tweet, tweet.
Umm.... what about the Eee PC? It's creating a new, very successful niche in the computer industry in the last six months, yet it's not powerful enough to run Vista. Is Microsoft going to end licensing of XP for the system, and give the whole market to linux? That would seem like an utterly stupid move on their part.
This incipient consumer rebellion is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the short history of PCs. For most of the '90s, Microsoft couldn't bring out new products fast enough to satisfy customers.
This is sort of empirical proof, to me at least, for what I have long thought, and I'm sure a lot around here thought as well. The days of an OS revolutionizing or vastly enhancing the way someone, especially a consumer, computes are long behind us. The OS has suffered from feature bloat for forever, and for the most part, a successful new OS is one that just doesn't hinder the work to be done. For most people, their computing needs have been satisfied, but they are pushed into a perpetual cycle of upgrading for upgrades sake. This "rebellion" is a symptom of this. XP satisfied people, and some of them are starting to realize what the terms "lock-in" and "monopoly" actually mean.
We're coming to a point where freedom in software is gaining in market value. I know it's cliche, and people have been spouting it for a over a decade, but I suspect that the general populace has come to a point where they can see that dollars and cents are in favor of not being tied to a corporation that makes money by selling solutions for the same problems over and over again. I don't know what iteration of "free" software will fill this void, but this mess with XP is not good for them. It won't be the downfall of Windows, they are far to crafty and firmly positioned for that to happen. However, the old business model of theirs is losing its effectiveness.
I hope I'm right, but even more so I hope I'm not turning into a linux nut that shouts "It's the year..." every time MS slips up.
I got a catholic block.
Oddly enough, quite a few people still have Windows 98 running (I have a Win98 machine in my basement doing my CDEX ripping).
When Microsoft turns off the activation servers, that basically REALLY means the end of WinXP... or is there a chance, any chance, that Microsoft will release a super-secret "unlock all" patch in 2014 that will allow XP to be activated. I am pretty sure the answer is NO, but I can still hope.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Probably the video drivers. I know my XP runs quite a bit faster than ubuntu. I can't run you tube videos in full screen in ubuntu without major drops in frame rate. Not only that, I have to restart X when changing users or the radeon gl renderer changes to mesa.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Nope, Windows 2000 native on Opterons and Athlon64s, with a variety of Nvidia video cards, works fine and runs plenty fast. There is no malware of any kind. Seriously, I've audited the crap out of everything, it's clean. (Auditing in this case means: Hard drives physically removed and attached to non-networked machines with fresh OS installs, run the latest malware scanners from the CDs. Always comes up clean.) The Windows machines are behind Linux firewalls and basically get nothing installed beyond a few commercial 2000-era applications, plus the latest Firefox.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
Probably, but I don't know that speed is everything to the average user. They'll put up with a bit of slowdown for an OS that feels powerful, looks pretty and has lots of neat little toys. And Linux has certainly had issues with looking pretty, which is understandable as talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,
And yes, I could be talking about OS X here too; only in the last few years has it not been an OS that's slow as molasses.
A whole article, with very informative and concise information about support and sales cycles of XP, but in the end the conclusion is you can put it off but you will bend over and take it.
THIS is what's wrong with proprietary software. If Vista were better - more compatible with existing software, less buggy, less DRM crap, I would WANT to move. I don't, but in the long run I don't have a choice. If you'd told me 3 years ago I'd be fighting to keep XP, and buying older hardware to ensure support for it, I'd have laughed at you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The only reason I keep XP around is for gaming anyways. I'm figuring by the time XP really goes the way of the dodo, the 3d support for Windows applications will be there. If that's some version of virtualization, or wine having DX9 support completely that's what I'll use. Both of these options are "mostly there" now. VMware does some 3D, and wine can run a lot of DX9 stuff, just not what I need.
I used Vista, and I don't really like it. I like Ubuntu, but there are some things like games, that it doesn't run. I feel choosing the OS, then the applications is like putting the cart before the horse. When I can run rFactor(a PC driving sim) in Linux, I can migrate to it. I fully believe I'll be able to do this before XP is dead.
I'm old enough to remember...
Here's what you're missing... Win95 did have a number of significant improvements over 3.11. Vista does not have significant improvements over XP. It's a few security fixes, lots of eye candy, and lots of DRM or similar protectionist practices that mean you have to contact MS every time you switch your hard drive.
There is no benefit whatsoever in switching to Vista. There are, however, consequences in terms of performance and in the freedom to change hardware etc. It might have been a different story if they'd delivered the Vista they initially promised -- the one with the new file system etc. The Vista they eventually delivered had none of that -- no significant improvements, no "must have" features whatsoever.
My laptop actually is slower with a standard Ubuntu install than with Vista
I don't really have a hard time believing this. Between video acceleration (non-restricted drivers) and things like networking support (ndiswrapper aka the spawn of satan) it might be easy to get a situation where some things are or just feel more speedy on Vista. I have Vista on a desktop at home just trying it out and performance (aside from file copying) has never been a problem. While I think there are some serious design issues with Vista I do not find any fault with response time or performance on moderately new hardware.
An extreme case is startup/shutdown/hibernate times. On XP/Vista it takes about 30-45 seconds goes from off to usable and about 8 seconds when in hibernation. I may as well shut down the Ubuntu partition since coming out of hibernation is no faster than just starting it up normally (which takes a lot longer than 30 seconds) and occasionally hibernation fails to resume correctly.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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You know who benefits from this? Apple. Expect Apple to really crank up the "move to the Mac" ads.
Vista's reputation is justifiably bad, and I'm never buying a copy. If I suddenly need a new Wintel machine, there's always someone like tigerdirect that has overstocked machines with XP pre-installed, and they'll probably be selling them for a year after XP is pulled from the shelves. But I think MS is only going to cause customers to truly hate their guts for this. They'd be smarter to allow XP sales until Windows 7 is ready (assuming they don't fuck that up.... a big if).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I started working with Ubuntu pretty seriously a couple of years ago, and at this point I can say that Ubuntu is my OS of first choice, and I have no plans to adopt Vista. Ever.
I may get forced in the Vista direction at some point, and I'm pretty sure that at some point I'll be forced to at least support it, but so far I've been able to pretend it isn't there and just hope for it to go away. My company is the main locus of such possible force, but they are so far mostly avoiding Vista. Unfortunately the in-house Linux that they prefer is Red Hat... It might be more secure, but I feel Ubuntu is much closer to being ready for the masses to work with.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
First I'd like to preface by saying if you LOVE Vista and you truly believe it's better than WindowsXP, then good for you. You are a minority according to everything I've heard and seen. (Does anyone have any studies, polls or surveys backing up either position?)
This is no classic example of market demand guiding any invisible hand to deliver. People want it, Microsoft says "too bad!"
Would anyone care to speculate for logical reasons why Microsoft would take this approach? I'm really out of ideas on this matter. Most people can agree that they dislike the idea... even people who LOVE Vista can't actually approve of Microsoft forcing people out of something they like can they? (Don't answer that, I know they can...)
So why are they doing this?
XP users will still get security fixes until 2014. By then MS will probably have put out windows 8 and everyone will be complaining about that. Just like everyone complained about 95, 98, ME, 2000, xp, and vista when they came out, and yet continued to buy MS's operating systems.
Be realistic 13 years of support is amazing long, and if that's not enough XP for you there isn't any rule that says you can't continue to use it after they stop patching it.
Long live ReactOS!
Well, at least I'm confident that by the time Windows 7 comes out, ReactOS will be in a usable state.
The key is to install FireFox, never use Internet Explorer or any of the apps that use it (like Outlook), and don't ever expose it directly to the Internet. (The one time I did, it only took an hour or so to get clobbered by the Welchia worm.)
My wife runs XP, but mainly because that's what came on her laptop. The only real advantage I see to XP is the fast user switching. But she's never going to be a Vista user: she just bought an iMac, to run Final Cut on for her video artwork.
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Absolutely. Backward compatibility is always blamed as the problem, but these legacy apps cost MONEY for new versions (if they are even available). This is one thing that always irritates me about Microsoft. Even on products they don't make any money on, like IE, they have to re-invent the wheel every time they release it.
With Linux you don't have that problem, most apps written 3 years ago for the first Ubuntu will work fine with 8.04 or any other distro. With OS X the OS had such a major change from PPC classic mac based to x86 Unix-based you can't make a claim of backwards compatibility but in general there's no reason to expect that NT X App shouldn't run on NT X+1. MS killing backwards compatibility is killing the entire MS monopoly and moving people to OS X or Linux.
Absolutely. The other great thing about Linux, if you are using FOSS, you can probably just download a version that works with your distro. A pain in terms of time, but at least it's not cash out of your pocket. If that doesn't work out for you, you next option is to modify the source code and recompile under the latest OS. Again, doesn't always work, and can be difficult for some apps, but in general a viable solution.
In general, Microsoft is an incredibly wasteful company. They spend millions of man-hours re-inventing products with minimal improvement. I have heard very little about Vista that is an improvement on XP, yet they spent a ton of work on it. Their whole business model is banking on the idea that software is continually obsolete, and that just isn't the case. A Word Processor is a Word Processor. An OS, as long as it's compatible with the hardware, is an OS. I can write a letter in Word 95 just as easily as I can in Word 2007, gets the same job done. Why would I spend thousands of dollars on all of the upgrades between now and then if Microsoft didn't periodically break all the backward compatibility.
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Win2K drivers are more common than Vista drivers.
Unless, of course, you want to run shiny new things. I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.
Since DX10 is only available for Vista, I'd say that's a pretty safe bet.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
One could say we in the free software business are our own enemies. We shoot ourselves in the feet all the time. Imagine...after all this time, with the [free] availability of specs of every kind, there is no decent ODF application beyond OpenOffice.org...which at version 2.4, still sucks bigtime by the way! Do not think I blindly support KDE because KDE's KOffice is a joke!
By the way, some author outlines ways for that other environment to improve.
Agreed, but as someone who has just painstakingly managed to install Windows XP on a Dell XPS 1530 (which is officially Vista-only) I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
For the uninitiated, supercache watches everything you do and records a log of what you cause to be loaded into memory and at what time/date it happens (this automatically introduces an overhead into every single memory related operation because Vista has to spend some resources on surveilling you). It then attempts to predict what you are going to use at a given point in time, and pre-caches as much of it as it considers to be reasonable. So for example, if I played Quake III every Wednesday night between 7-8pm, Vista would start grinding away at about 7pm on Wednesdays loading the texture files into RAM. Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
The net effect of all of the above is that Vista spends a hell of a lot of time sitting there churning away using your disks and RAM to load "stuff" into memory that you "might" need. All of this for the 1-2 seconds you are likely saving by not having to load Word or Quake III or whatever from disk should you happen to want to use it.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Which returns me to the original point - XP is already a challenge to get running with some newer hardware. But if hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of their hardware drivers (which should be trivial if they are doing 32 bit Vista drivers) then there's really very little we need from Microsoft.* XP is a stable, solid, mature OS which does what it does pretty well. I for one intend to keep using it into the foreseeable future.
* This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
Read Pynchon.
I can't speak to the Radeon GL Application switching to Mesa as I use Nvidia cards and don't have that issue.
But Flash 9.0.115 on Linux is TERRIBLE. That plugin is so unstable it crashes Youtube every other video and eats RAM. This isn't Linux's fault its Adobe's.
But there is a work around. Extract the FLV and use ffmpeg or mencoder and change it into another format, it looks MUCH Better. Just get it out of that horrid flash plugin.
Er, Compiz isn't a memory hog though. I just measured it, and with all the standard features turned on it seems to use about 8MB more than a standard non-compositing window manager (e.g. metacity). It's also very fast and responsive with even minimal hardware acceleration (I'm using a machine with built-in intel 845G graphics, and compiz works very nicely).
I don't know what MS did to fuck up Vista so much, but you can't lay it at the feet of "compositing window managers."
We live, as we dream -- alone....
When you post stuff like this people are just going to point out the youtube.com video WINDOWS VISTA AERO VS LINUX UBUNTU BERYL. 3 million people have seen it. Why haven't you? It's from February of last year. Compiz has improved some since.
Here is Compiz running on a seven year old 800 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM. It runs better than Vista did on the last dual core notebook with 1GB I tried it on, and it looks better too.
Here's Compiz running on an eee PC. Isn't that sweet? I hate lugging around 15 pounds of kit and the eee will be my next PC purchase. It weighs two pounds. Did you hear they're only 300 bucks (No, not the software. The whole thing!)?
I hear Vista comes with a few docklets or widgets or whatever they're calling them now. Ubuntu comes with this small collection of neat little toys. I didn't count them. I think there's thousands of them in there. People might find one or two interesting things in there.
Now what were you saying again? Oh, yeah,
Now you're projecting. In design are you? Apparently others are more giving. Perhaps that's because what they get back is "Progress" and that's good value.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
VMs and emulating the A: drive doesn't help if the auditing office insists on receiving the data via snail-mail delivered floppy (no joke!)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
In 2014, Microsoft will stop all support of Windows XP. Oh noes!
You guys DO realize that this would be like someone running Windows 95 today, right? XP came out in 2002 and was replaced in 2007. A full seven years after that, XP will be phased out. There will likely be two major OS releases, plus Vista, by the time that happens.
Not to mention this has already happened with every other Windows release to date, including Windows 2000. In fact, Windows 2000 (Professional and Server) officially lost Mainstream Support in the middle of 2005, and its Extended Support (security updates only) will end in 2010. That's a 10 year lifespan.
The real story here is that Microsoft has committed to supporting an OS for 12 years after you paid less than $200 for it.
-David
Ideally I would run the scan by unplugging the network cable and booting from directly the malware-scanner CD. Unfortunately nobody makes such a thing -- it's like the "antivirus" companies don't really care about reliability. Running the scan on the target system itself is pointless, since some system-level malware could be tampering with the results. That's why I take the hard drives out of the target systems and attach them to a known-clean system (fresh OS+scanner install, no network) to run the scan.
But really the elaborate malware scan is just window dressing so I can provide some tangible evidence that my systems aren't infected; I know they're clean because I keep them clean on a day-to-day basis by not installing tons of random crap I found in the net.toilet, keeping applications and plug-ins (and pointless upgrades!) to a bare minimum, and keeping an eye on the security bulletins. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of computer science.
You could always use ClamAV installed on something like SLAX, that would be dead simple to set up and keep up to date; the reliable (ie. transparent, not "we tested them somehow, just trust us that it was a good test") malware scan tests I've seen tend to place ClamAV pretty high, somewhere between Kaspersky and Norton. I swear Avast made a live disk, some BartPE-based one I think, but yeah, it's a bit odd/suspicious that the major antivirus/antimalware companies don't make live disks . . . perhaps one could check to see which ones work well in WINE :)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
The DirectX SDK comes with a "debug" software driver for both DX9 and DX10. Essentially, you use this driver to test your application to see how it's supposed to look - since it's entirely done in software, random graphics glitches caused by drivers aren't a factor, so you know if it's your fault or nvidia/ATI's.
The debug driver supports DX10 and works on XP, you can install the SDK right now and try it out for yourself. Catch is that you'll get about 0.0001FPS rendering little more than a rotating, untextured cube. Still, you want DX10 on XP? You've got it.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Which is why every computer shop, or company worried about security, or technician, should make their own.
It's pretty easy actually - through about a dozen methods, including *nix or eComStation live boot disks with ClamAV, et al installed, or using BartPE and building the tools into the ISO, or using Hirens and doing the same, or... well, you get the point... the list of choices are plenty.
And with a rewritable, it is pretty easy to update the disk every day by dragging the updated definitions/apps into the correct directory (or with the tiny cost of CDs, burn a new one every day - or with a good selection of NIC drivers on a Bart disk, let the programs auto update the definitions through the Internet before it even touches the machine's hard drives).
I agree it would be kinda nice if a company made such a product - but what company out there does a good job at dealing with all the threats possible on a PC? You'd still need multiple solutions... the only one I know of that comes close is Spyware Terminator since you can enable ClamAV support. But even so, I prefer the "multiple solutions to each issue" method, namely because even with every program updated, while there is a high level of overlap (eg: they all agree on/find 99% of the viruses and spyware and trojans on a computer; each finds just a few more that the other programs in their category dont). As a neat example, one machine that the customer insisted we could not wipe and needed to clean (5 digit list of infections) required 6 different software packages to find them all... oddly there were two viruses that everything but an outdated McAfee found (we checked, they definitely were infected)... yet ClamAV and 3 other packages missed it. On the other hand, we clean one of our customer's systems with ClamAV to grab everything that Norton and McAfee miss.
So, I prefer the "roll your own" approach :-) And I am guessing that anyone who needs to do true scans/cleaning of their systems also use multiple tools if such issues are critical to them.
I know they're clean because I keep them clean on a day-to-day basis by not installing tons of random crap I found in the net.toilet, keeping applications and plug-ins (and pointless upgrades!) to a bare minimum, and keeping an eye on the security bulletins. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of computer science.Sadly, as anyone who does this day in and day out can tell you, that is not enough to ensure a system is clean. Windows (any version, any service pack) does not need any user intervention or use to get infected. I'm not saying it is horrendous (nor am I saying it's not - not making any statement either way)... what I am saying is that machines do get infected even with all updates installed - and no user in front of the keyboard.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Disclaimer: I work for M$ft (but in no way should my comments here be considered representative of Microsoft) Windows 2000 was pried from my cold dead fingers only because XP is required to VPN into work (some days it's nice to just work from home), but XP isn't as bad as I'd expected. Vista on the other hand, well, I crawled through a lot of broken glass working with IE7 Beta2 and I will NEVER willingly install it on any system I need to actually do something other than run office and surf the web. Windows7, on the other hand, looks very promising. Although, the WinMin kernel and such strongly reminds me of something some Finnish guy slapped together when he was in college... Enough background, to my point. One of my biggest problems with Microsoft is how as soon as there's a new platform, all development and marketing effort is put into it. Currently I'm working as part of an application development team for a Windows Mobile product. We're targeting WinMo 5 + .Net Compact Framework 1.0 because that's the largest existing install base out there for Windows based SmartPhones and PocketPCs. When we run into problems and post questions to mailing lists we're regularly getting called idiots for not using Compact Framework 3 or WinMo 6. Sure, what we need to do would be easy using those platforms, but NOBODY sells a phone with that already installed and it's asinine to expect users to upgrade just to run our application.
You can still buy phones with WinMo 5 and .Net CF 1.0, yet there's no internal support to speak of for either technology. I shudder to think what hell 3rd party developers must be going through. The platform teams at Microsoft tell us to use .Net CF 3, when .Net CF 2 isn't even standard on the market yet.
For that reason, I've decided to go for upper management rather than technical individual contributor just so I might have a chance at changing some of these fscked up ideas, or at least attempt to give developers some room for better practices and refinement of technologies rather than jumping to the latest and greatest when there's still lots of room for improvement on what's already in the market.
DONT PANIC
Mcafee disagrees.
AVG disagrees.
Or... if you don't want those, you can just make a "live cd" using any of the countless utilities out there for it.
Or if you're feeling crazy, toss vmware onto a knoppix dvd and boot windows from either an image on the dvd or boot it straight from the drive, isolated in vmware.
PITA. PAIN in THE ASS. You read me. First I wanted to install an application. I tryed to fudge with the network things to get it work with my german t-online dsl. Did not work. After roughly 10-12 hours of googling, trying, rebooting, I gave up. So I used my XP PC tzo download .tar and / or .deb files. Then with an USB transmit it to the Ubuntu PC. First application was cdemu. I tryed the .deb did not work. Googled. Oh so the vhsa whatever is not working has to enter cryptic command to restart it, then restart a daemon. Did nbot work. Then somebody commented in a CDEMU forum to just do a freaking mount -o whatever with the ISO. THAT did work. Then I tryed to install the application on the ISO. Spent hours. Did not work. Then finally found some post hinting that the app is not supported in any new kernel stuff (I guess I can give that in being my fault for not googling first to see if the app I got was supported or not). So I started installing an alternative instead. Have to compile it... Right now I am trying to find out why there seems to be some problem with it, some dependency with libgcc whatever. I left it for next week end. I thought, of playing a few of my oldies. I have on my XP box DOSBOX. Installed it worked like a charm without fudging anything. But with ubuntu .... Could not get-apt (remember : no network, meaning I am screwed). Turn out after installing a few app, that i have NO FREAKING MIDI SOUND! WTF ! I am now in the process of downloading timidity and some freepats.
I might be a rare bird to install some of those app, but plain freaking dosbox was runnning out of the box in windows, and I have to install and download third party stuff in ubuntu. Argue as much as you wish, but I am nowhere to recommend ubuntu to anybody without a lot of time and knowledge.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Actually, that's not really true. WDM on Win98 is only supported for a few device classes. It doesn't support video cards, printers, scsi adapter, network cards or filesystems, or anything on a non plug and play bus. Video devices are completely different between Win98 and NT based OSs. Scsi and Network cards each have a minport architecture that was portable across 16 and 32 bit OSs backi in the Win98 days but Vista and XP have a very different version of NDIS than Win98. Mostly WDM was a way for people to write USB drivers that worked on Win98 and Win2K. But USB has changed a lot since then, and so has WDM. Finally, lots of modern USB drivers will use WDF in kernel mode or are user mode code that uses WinUSB.sys, and neither of those will work on Win98. In fact neither of them will work on Win2k either.
Other Win98 'drivers' are actually just hacks - code that must run in Ring 0. They are VxDs, a system that was originally designed to virtualise devices underneath multiple Dos boxes. Antivirus software and the like used this environment to hook filesystem access for example. Obviously this can't work on NT since there are no VxDs and the filesystem layer is completely different.
Even between successive releases of NT based OSs, there isn't any guarantee that drivers will work. Most people know this and write their inf files so the device will only install on one of the OS versions they tested.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You could change it to ihatewinXPslightlylessthanVista.
I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I can attest the opposite. I don't notice any slowdowns in vista when it has loaded. In fact, I just know that my firefox on vista loads way faster than on xp. I will admit the fancy animations can simulate less responsiveness (but those can be turned off) and that vista cold boot time is fairly slow. But XP cold boots can be just as slow with poor drivers and enough software set to run themselves in the background on startup (aka quicktime and other stupid programs).
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
You went in the wrong direction in my opinion. I left UAC on but run as a normal user so anytime the UAC pops up I have to type in the admin password. It is how I know that software is either written incorrectly or trying to do something I probably don't approve of. There have been many instances where I installed a piece of software only to find itself trying to install other crapware because the UAC window would popup when the other software tried to start installing itself.
I didn't disable vista's memory caching features first because I think that better memory utilization is a good idea for any OS especially with today's cheap memory prices. So instead I disabled other culprits that cause high disk activity. First I disabled indexing because there aren't very many times when I want to search my entire hard disk. I just don't have that many document files that are worth searching. But the disk activity was still too high. So next I disabled windows defender which is window's new built-in malware scanner (aka antivirus). Bingo, disk utilization has dropped significantly.
Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
And I say let it use every bit of "free" memory. Free memory is like letting that fancy convertible you bought sit in the garage while you go off and use your old car. You paid for the resource, now your OS has magically decided that it should not be used!? If I knew that my OS didn't need that extra 1.5gb most of the time then I ought to take that 1.5gb of ram and sell it on ebay.
People think that cached memory is some kind of huge tax when it isn't. If a block of memory is allocated to a program, it does not need to be zero'ed out. It can be handed with all of its garbage to the program requesting a new block of memory. So a block of cache or a block of free memory is all the same. The only tax paid in caching is filling the cache.
Additionally, Windows XP already "surveys" you. When you go into the add/remove programs control panels in XP it will show you how often you utilize each piece of software you have installed.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Turn off windows defender.
I have a vista machine with an intel dual core 1.8ghz and 2gb of ram. I'd rather use it than my single core laptop with 1gb of ram or my work desktop with a 3.4ghz p4, 2gb of ram, and windows xp.
hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of thei
Company I used to work for is STILL shipping product based on DOS 6.1x! Granted this is an embedded use of the OS in a turnkey system. I think they bought the rights to ship as many copies as they wanted. (From IBM not M$).
Now, if you manage to shield a Win98 box from the external world so that it doesn't need these 3rd party tools running, then sure, you'll have a "GDI load" similar to what such a machine saw on 1998, and it'll be usable. But that requires discipline and tons of good sense on the part of the user. Anything else, and it's either too risky or quite literally impossible.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.