[geeks] Info for Cheap/Acceptable PC upgrades

[Andrew Weiss]

On Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 11:19 PM, Geek wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I have 98 SE(among other OSes) on the desk for gaming. I have Win 2K
> Pro for my main workstation. I prefer Win 2K, properly patched, and
> find it tons more stable and useable then 98 SE. In my view it is the
> best Windows, and the only one I will use regularly. The only reason
> I run Windows 98 is because most of the games I have won't run well
> on Win 2K.
>
And for me it is the only and last version of Windows I will run at my 
house.  It works well enough for all my games (all of them thoroughly 
modern), makes use of both my Pentium Pro 200 1MB's and 1/2 gig of RAM, 
is more standards based concerning networking and other mind-boggling 
things that they needed to fix in NT 4.0 (i.e. LDAP compatible AD versus 
proprietary NT 4.0 domains, and formatting NTFS out of the box rather 
than making FAT partitions and converting them later... (Breaks the 4 GB 
barrier for partitions), and of course not requiring drive letters for 
mount points)  Windows 2000 is extremely flexible.  I really like the 
mmc and how customizable it is.  I of course in about 8 years of working 
with NT OS'es have never had a networking problem with them and I run 
several protocols and many services (Services for Macintosh via 
Appletalk and TCP/IP, IPX (for older games), File/Print for Microsoft 
Networks, Print services for UNIX, etc.).  I won't run XP because not 
only is everything obfuscated and babyfied beyond belief, the fact that 
Product Activation and remote disablement at Microsoft's whim of your OS 
even exists is morally reprehensible and I won't use an OS that includes 
those features whether or not they are turned on by default or cracked.  
And I think XP is kind of ugly (LUNA) ... it's a bad rip-off of OS X 
that bleeds to much screen real-estate for no good reason.  It's truly 
the Fischer-Price Windows OS of the future. Windows FP?...

As for the DOS based OS's I'm so sick of OS's whose uptime is measured 
in hours... therefore I no longer run Classic MacOS nor do I run any DOS 
based Windows... I do run DOS on a 486 for ancient games, but that 
machine never crashes really.  98 SE was, however, the best DOS based 
Windows... ME would have been a marginal improvement except they took 
away the one saving grace of the whole platform... the ability to boot 
in command line mode.

Andrew