Replies

It's a Microsoft - Intel conspiracy and the consumer is the loser:

Intel fights to make constantly faster and more powerful processors to make our software run better.
Microsoft sees newer/faster processors as machines with extra cycles that need to be exploited.

The result is lardware like XP, which makes ludicrously fast computer systems seem pedestrian.

Windows completely fulfilled the 'must-have' computer feature set with windows 98SE, and made it rock stable with Win2000. Sorry, no more upgrade money from me.

I like the move to the .Net common language runtime. You can add that to Windows 2000 and later. It fixes DLL hell and gives a consistent, garbage collected set of libraries to all front end languages. C# gives you the best of C++ and Java concepts. I'm still using Java in servlets where appropriate, but I prefer C#/managed C++ for most new work.

Windows completely fulfilled the 'must-have' computer feature set with windows 98SE, and made it rock stable with Win2000. Sorry, no more upgrade money from me.

Speaking as one who fiddles with real-time DSP, let me say that the significance of WDM drivers is not to be minimized.

I am on XP Home and while I don't much about Win2K, I have had 95, 98 and ME and XP, is orders of magnitude better than any of them. I have 768 M of ram, so memory is not a problem. I think if you get much below 128 meg it can get slow. But so long as you have enough memory, I am pretty sure that XP runs way faster than 98 or Me on any machine. The kernel streaming thing really works.

I like the way DirectShow architcture is built into the OS, too.

I kindly disagree.

The consumer wins big!

Today I have a movie and recording studio on my desktop. Not to mention access to the world publishing via the WEB!

AMAZING TECHNOLOGY, I'll take all I can get.

>> Windows completely fulfilled the 'must-have' computer feature set with windows 98SE, and made it rock stable with Win2000. Sorry, no more upgrade money from me.

Yup.
I had been using 98SE since it first came out. Until just recently, it did everything I needed, but as I find myself storing more data, I wanted the security and reliability of NTFS, and I figured 2KPro would be the way to go.

Couldn't get it though, so I went with XP Pro. Had some difficulty getting it to install with some of my "legacy" hardware, but I got those kinks ironed out, and I must say it performs better than expected on a 450 MHz. K6-2 with 192 MB RAM. It really does boot and start programs faster than 98SE, just like it says on the box, and I'm not sure 2KPro would have. I was concerned about the "product activation", but I learned about, well, let's say a patch, that made that unnecessary. There are other things integrated in the shell that are somewhat offensive, but they are being configured out as they are discovered. I guess this is a half hearted retraction of things I've heard around and repeated on other threads. Out of the box, it does a lot of the evil things we have heard, but it's fixable.

But now I need to do a new Linux install to be able to reliably handle the NTFS volume. Needed to dump Mandrake anyhow. Don't know what flavor I'll wind up with, but it won't be that one.

Dave in Eugene