Nuke Redmond!

From: allisonp <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Apr 17 21:01:25 2000

>I wonder why we never had access to this stuff at work, I'm sure it
would've
>been of some help.


only if you could find what you sought. ;-P

>Yes, I'd be using NT4 myself except that I cannot run DVE (Vectrex
emulator)
>under it. I haven't tried it under Win2K Professional yet, but I'm none too
>hopeful.


I'm running NT4ws and things I was told would not run seems to work fine!
Even Gcadd6.1 (a PITA even under dos) runs smoothly. Then again I'm not
running AGP video (using a PCI 2mb S3 board).

>One thing I will say about Win2K is that it seems to be far more stable
than
>any other M$ OS on my hardware thus far. NT4 was giving me memory faults
>when running OE5, Win95 is flaky at best and Win98 wouldn't run for more
>than 4 or 5 minutes without "freezing" up completely. Sigh.


Well, there is a message there.

Memory faults??? doesn't this sugggest something to you? I'd start with the
hardware setup. You may have bad ram, some device that is abusing the
bus. or just maybe something is misconfigured. FYI there is a patch for W95
if your using a AMDk6-2/300 or faster (timing race condition in w95 breaks).
That was after I fofund the board didn't want to run PC100 but did run PC66
as stable.

That is an example of what subtle things can screw a system up. While I
don't love w95 I have 40 clients running it and for the most part one burp a
week among them all is the common thing and often reboot solves that. I've
found office97 to be more troublesome. Then again, we don't run games and we
dont run IE5.0 for obvious reasons. I'd look at that system for problems
that make it unstable. Video drivers are commonly a problem, and some sound
drivers are painful. the worst problem we have are things like ODBC drivers
that leak, solution is a once perday stop/restart of Coldfusion on the NT
server. Over the last year I've spent a lot of time debunking the
rebilability myth and NT3.51 can be stable and so can W95. The work was
finding all those gremlin apps, drivers and some hardware that didn't work.
Then installing W95 correctly in some cases. MS code is not as robust as
I'd like but if it falls over too often then you have a different problem.

W95 is at least three versions with OSR2.1 (aka 95c) being the latest W95
and win 98 is really 95 with bug fixes and enhancements and currently OSR2
is the latest. W98 is more stable than 95 and has some debugging functions
to help. Upgrades are available, W98 OSR2 is free for download if you have
W98! NT4 is really improved 3.51, same deal, more stable ONLY if SP4
or later is installed. However bad apps and bad hardware will get you even
with Linux, faster as it uses hardware harder! Start with good hardware.

I'm not a MS lover, though it makes me a living now. I have foudn one thing
that was true when I was hacking PDP-8s and later 8080s.

                   Don't blame the cow for soggy cereal.


Allison
Received on Mon Apr 17 2000 - 21:01:25 BST