Re: Help needed - Computer stuff

salty@xxxxxxx wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:17:22 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
<dishborealis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


<salty@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:mj7fo3l6f847f9ots2m8g9h6gpba6muk1q@xxxxxxxxxx

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:37:18 -0500, gfretwell@xxxxxxx wrote:


On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:44:10 -0500, salty@xxxxxxx wrote:


Boot times were far more important in win9x because you have to do it so often.

I have machines around here that run 24/7 and never get rebooted.

Sorry, but that is an exaggeration, unless you just boot them and
never use them, or you possibly meant they run for 24 hours a day for
a week between reboots. :')

There is a reason for that. Win9x was designed with a fixed 64kb of
system resources. As programs are opened and closed, system resources
are used. Not all are returned when you close a program. Eventually,
you run out of resources and your computer locks up or blue screens.
At that point, you have no alternative except to do a reboot. Ther is
no way around that.

Win XP and 2000 are completely different and do not have this well
documented limitation.


Maybe he only runs one app on some of the machines, never bouncing between other apps that get started & shut down all day. When I ran WIN98SE, I saw the problem you described all the time, except on occasional weekends when I knew I'd be getting massive numbers of faxes, so I'd restart the machine late Friday, turn on Winfax, and let it run all weekend. Monday morning, the machine still ran briskly. Of course, as soon as I started up the other 5-6 apps I work with all day, things went back to normal. Nasty, in other words. :)



Resources running down would not affect speed at all. The computer
would run until resources went below about 5%, and then it would pitch
a fit and freeze. There was no gradual slowdown associated with this
problem. If you had memory leaks in your apps that slowed the computer
down by forcing greater use of the swap file, that was entirely
unrelated to system resources.


There was another issue with win98 that existed in all versions that
guarantee that they have to be rebooted periodically even if you never
open a single application. There was a patch to fix it, but it rarely
got applied because it was rare to find a win98 computer that ran long
enough (49.7 days) for the problem to occur. :')


Yes, I ran into the 49.7 day bug on our server at my former employer. It lived in a cupboard together with the telephone switchboard and was up 24/7 running 98SE, FTP, EMail, various shares, some VPN stuff and an intranet web server with a fair bit of CGI stuff with only a scheduled monthly reboot from 2000 to 2006. (The MS patch didnt actually fix all the 49.7 day issues) It did get the occasional new hard drive, RAM or CPU upgrade etc. but never needed a reinstall.

Should have seen our POS box on top of the till on the counter. Ran the Accounts, cash sales and Invoicing + word 6 and Lotus 123 for windows for doing estimates for 10 years, 5 days a week, on a Dell 486/50 running stripped down Windows for Workgroups 3.11. If we were still in the repair business it would still be in use, the UK hasn't swapped Pounds for Euros yet and that would have needed the accounting software upgraded. We kept its predecessor (A very small form factor Elonex 386 box) up to date apart from the data files which were backed up to the server daily, as a hot swap backup, that system was mission critical, but never had any trouble with it.

--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & >32K emails --> NUL:
'Stingo' Albacore #1554 - 15' Early 60's, Uffa Fox designed,
All varnished hot moulded wooden racing dinghy.
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