Re: Anyone using Vista?

Clark F Morris wrote:
On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 12:45:02 -0700 (PDT), riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Mar 8, 2:34 pm, Clark F Morris <cfmpub...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 7 Mar 2009 10:53:22 -0800 (PST), rip...@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 8, 6:13 am, SkippyPB <swieg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
."

I wouldn't touch Vista. Hell I've got 4 boxes in my house, 3 of
them on XP Pro and 1 on Win98. I acutally like the Win98 box the
best but really have few complaints about XP Pro. From what
little I've seen of either Vista or Win 7, I see no reason or
advantage to upgrading. If they are like most MS operating
systems, you'll need a larger hard drive and more and faster
memory to make them work right. No thanks.

Microsoft develops software to meet the exacting needs of its
customers. You are not a Microsoft customer, OEMs, Gateway, Dell,
Walmart are, you are customers of them.

The OEMs want a reason to make the computers you already own
obsolete so you have to throw them away and buy new, bigger,
faster ones. Microsoft has produced what they want.

The OEMs want a range of products from cheap and nasty that will
get you into the shop (a $500 laptop with Home Basic) but you
wouldn't show it off to your friends so that they can sell you up
to a $1000 with 'Premium' or $1500 with Ultimate that gives you
'bragging rights'.

The users just want a box with an operating system that gets the
job done. Windows 98 did that. Windows 2000 nearly did that. XP
eventually did that.

If XP+ had just been a better XP then it would work on existing
machines and nothing would be there for MS's customers. In fact it
is very noticable that Windows machines slow down over time as they
aquire more software, spyware, viruses, anti-virus, updaters and
such. The solution is to buy another faster machine of course,
every year if the OEMs have their way.

A wipe and fresh install of the OS will usually get the machine
back to working full speed, so a new XP+ would have revived many
machines and not required replacement. OEMs did not want that at
all. So the users got stuck with Vista, and Windows 7 will not
return to XP levels though it may make Vista capable machines work
OK.

Actually just after Vista was released MS announced that the next
Windows would be 64 bit only to ensure that all the 32 bit machines
were thrown away.

If MS did not look after its customers this way they (the OEMs)
would look for other way to restore profitability, such as
reducing their vast payments to MS and putting Linux on machines.

The problem with doing that is that if they sell a Windows machine
they know that 2 or 3 years later that user will have to buy a new
machine. If they sell a Linux machine the user will run it for
twice that time or more.

I stopped using my Windows 98 computer when Microsoft finally
dropped support.

I do actually have a Windows 98 SE2 computer here. It didn't stop
working when Microsoft 'dropped support', I am sure that they would
prefer that it did. As I run the latest Open Office, Firefox and
other non-MS stuff on it, when I need to, and never run Outlook
Express or IE then 'MS support' is not required or wanted.

I am still using the 2004 computer with XP because the
system is supported and it is doing what I want it to. Using certain
features of the web or possibly getting serious about scanning and
editing my slide collection will require a more powerful computer.
Depending on the collection of functions desired, Linux, OSX, BSD,
etc. could well get to be as resource hungry.

The main machine that I use for most of my work was setup in 2003. I
did upgrade the RAM to 750 Mbyte but it is < 2MHz single CPU. It has
51 GBytes of 'stuff' on it including several thousand photographs. It
has many, many software packages and development software, including
3 versions of Open Office, its runs PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache, ...
It's CPU is currently 99.3% idle. It usually doesn't get rebooted at
all, but there was a power cut last week.

Other systems do not get clogged up and slow down like Windows does.
The main reason for this is that Windows runs several 'update agents'
and spyware from installing applications, and the system also runs
'optimisers'.

I suspect that a 600
Canadian dollar laptop with Vista service pack 1 will outperform
both this computer and my wife's 1 gigabyte AMD Athlon 3200.


That will be a clean, fresh install of Vista. Try a fresh install of
XP on your old machine and Vista may not do so well against that.


If Linux became popular then it would be good enough to reuse old
machines and there would be no need to buy anything new at all.

The netbooks started with Linux because it would be inappropriate
to pay MS $100 or more for the OS to put on a $200 machine. MS had
to counter that with XP and could only charge $20 or less (some
say as little as $5). If Windows 7 by some magic does run on a
netbook it will be equivalent to 'starter' edition and run only 3
tasks and is unlikely to be only $20.

While XP on netbooks sells about the same numbers as Linux
netbooks, this seems to be that users want XP and not Vista. They
are choosing an XP netbook rather than a Vista Laptop, not so much
because they want a netbook, but because they don't want Vista.


I may use mine for just driving my scanner and anything else where I
am not on the Internet. Support matters when the environment changes
and on the Internet, that is always the case. The real reason in my
case was because Zone Alarm dropped support for Windows 98. It also
allowed my to avoid figuring out how to set up my wireless modem to
use our high speed Internet connection.

Clark, I noticed you are scanning slides.

I have a collection of over 700 of them that I'd really like to digitise but
I haven't been able to find a scanner capable, at a reasonable price.

Someone said I could use a *** of metallic foil with a normal scanner and
I tried it, but the results were "moderate".

Do you have any information as to how best to do this?

What is working for you?

Pete.

--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."


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