Re: Any comments?


"Peter Lacey" <lacey@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:441B2A4A.1CD9439F@xxxxxxxxxx
Richard wrote:


I am sure that there are millions of people using Windows with no
problems at all, no security issues, no failures, no lock ups at all
ever. There are, however, millions (well at least 10s of thousands) of
people running Windows who are unknowingly zombies in spam remailing
networks, and/or are infected with virusses and worms.

It may be interesting to note that there is a whole computing universe
out there in which many of these problems simply don't occur. I'll
instance two machines that were absolutely bullet-proof when it came to
lockups or programs interfering with each other or memory leaks or
crashing the system. None of these ever happened, so long as the
machine was not physically malfunctioning. These were the IBM S/36, and
the various systems running PRIMOS. IBM, of course, was once the
biggest computer company in the known universe, but Prime, although it
got into the top 500 for a while, has long since vanished and never had
resources comparable to IBM. My point is that such operating systems
can and have been built. Whether the difference is in the resources, or
the ability and span of control of the people in charge of the
development, or even the architecture of the machines, doesn't matter -
if it can be done at all, it ought to be achievable by all!

I imagine that AS/400's are pretty tough, too. How about IBM or Unisys
mainframes?

(A Prime systems engineer told me that he'd heard of a couple of virus
attempts. But nothing ever came of them. I'm not claiming immunity
from viruses is possible - any system can be cracked, I imagine, if the
necessary effort is taken).

(I do most of my work under WIN98 because that's what the PC came with
and I don't want the aggravation of upgrading and new problems (that's
to say, not before I have to!) It is stable enough for what I need and
will run everything that I need. Yet it locks up every couple of days,
sometimes when switching from one app to another, sometimes after trying
to to wake up from standby. After standby, I can't print - although
that may be a driver problem, not a MS problem; still that can hardly be
a situation that wasn't anticipated. And sometimes it won't shut down!)

So, it ISN'T really "stable enough for what I need and will run everything
that I need." is it? Because it won't do it all of the time. If you need it
to work at a time when it is locking up, it isn't meeting your needs. It IS
stable enough for you to get useful work from it, but it is far from perfect
or even "pretty good".

What happens is that we all come to accept what our systems do and find
workarounds for the problems.

I understand your hesitance to upgrade (been there myself...). I often build
PCs for friends and charities where the user doesn't have much available
cash, so I scrounge old boxes and bits and pieces. Win 98 (SE, NOT ME) was a
very good OS but XP is much more stable. I used to immediately effect an
upgrade to XP until I found that some of the old boxes simply couldn't
support it. Win98 will run reasonably happily in 64MBs; XP won't. So then it
becomes a memory upgrade. (Sometimes with older boxes, the memory is very
hard to get...). Then you find that a 5 year old HD is starting to throw bad
sectors and getting nearer to its MTBF so you might want to replace that.
Even if you can acquire a smaller (say 10 GB) hard drive for a nominal sum
(I found a computer shop in Tauranga the other day who let me have one they
had removed from an old machine for $15 (when they knew I was doing it for a
worthy cause)), there are still risks.

The one I'm proudest of is a system I built for a disabled lady who wanted
to do a remote study writing course. She has a fully functioning XP system
with XP Office (all legal) that connects over broadband, and the whole
system cost $NZ104. So far it has performed flawlessly for about 3 months; I
have my fingers crossed... :-) All of the hardware was begged borrowed or
recycled from other old systems that were non-functional. It took me 30
hours to get the bits and build it. :-)

The bottom line is that if you have a machine running Win 98, you are
PROBABLY better to bite the bullet and replace the whole thing, than attempt
to upgrade.

Pete.


.

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