Re: Win2K with 96M RAM?

The message <VA.00000d8c.122124fe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

In article news:<2006031515012785168@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Johnny B Good
wrote:
Mind you, I didn't give up on win95osr2 (never used win98/ME in anger
on any of my machines) until almost two years back when it finally made
sense to upgrade my P2/350(o/cd to 467MHz) BX440 based system (5 good
years of service!) to my current XP2500+ setup when I had no choice but
to ditch the old OS and I proved that win2k was the only acceptable MS
alternative.

My main 'workhorse' PC is still of roughly that vintage (OK, not quite:
it's a 440 GX chipset, rather than BX, and is a dual-CPU PIII/450 with UW
SCSI disks). Running nicely with Win2k (though it ran NT4 for several years
- partly because Matsushita/Panasonic couldn't get their DVD-RAM driver
software for 2k to work on dual-CPU machines (bunch of incompetent
amateurs)).

I've never run 9x on that box (why would I, with 2 CPUs?) but it's little
brother "test/backup system" which has identical hardware apart from having
a single PIII/450 and 440BX chipset and a tad less RAM has run 98 (spit!)
for test purposes (I don't recall whether I ever put 95 on one of the test
disks). All forms of Windows will benefit from more RAM (up to their usable
RAM limit); but while 9x often *needs* more or it will fall over, NT just
slows down if it hasn't got enough.

Cheers,
Daniel.

If your experience of win9x has largely been of the 98/ME variety, I'm
afraid you've only seen the broken versions and not enjoyed win9x at
it's best (ignoring any "Toy Interface" requirements) exemplified by a
caringly configured win95OSR2.x setup. :-)

A properly set up win95osr2 with plenty of ram (512 or 768MB) behaves
like you've described for NT4, ie (assuming you've eliminated the flaky
apps out of the equation :-), it just slows down, rather than fall over
(however, I don't claim it was as robust as an equally well configured
NT based setup).

The real reason behind one wagg's statement wrt the horrendous cost of
the remedial action involved in addressing the 'millenium bug' where the
mere billions of dollars being spent were as nothing compared to the
trillions of dollars in lost productivity due to the endless reboots of
win95/win98 on office desktops worldwide, was down to the crazy default
behaviour regarding profligate consumption of the ram to file caching.

That single (or two) line entry in the system.ini file made all the
difference in the world (and I discovered this tuning tip on a website
devoted to windows98 annoyances!).

The main problem at the time of win95 with NT4 was the horrendously
high minimum ram requirement of 32MB. Laughable now with 'entry level'
systems starting with 512MB or more of the stuff.

Like it or not, win95osr2 was as good as it was going to get with win9x
regarding performance and stability. Of course, if IBM had spent as much
on advertising OS/2 Warp as Microsoft had on windows95, we'd have had an
even better OS gracing our desktops instead of, by comparison, the MS
PoS that led to Microsoft's 'world domination' of the desktop market and
subsequently to that T&UPoS we call winXP.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: slow dns for domain name
    ... All machines behind the router show their 10.8.33.X address. ... You are right, for my desktops, I have just setup the /etc/hosts file. ...
    (comp.os.linux.networking)
  • RE: Web Edition with more than 2GB RAM?
    ... Setup should work just fine, you just will only see 2 gig of RAM. ... Web Edition with more than 2GB RAM? ... <They're providing great machines for the job, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
  • Re: oo2c port for nmos6502
    ... I believe that 1mhz 6502 is fast processor, and 48-64k of ram is a big ... On slow/small machines we need to employ skill ... Needless to say, it runs Native Oberon impressively fast, and a custom ... although that might change if I have to do some more embedded systems work. ...
    (comp.lang.oberon)
  • Re: How to change Windows server 2003 Domain User password?
    ... desktop with common files or shortcuts on desktop. ... If you want the same desktop definitions you can setup users with roaming ... Check DNS (domain machines should point ONLY to their local DNS), ... the problem could be on server configuration or services ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)
  • can anyone confirm? computer resets when loading winx, not softw, one bad address when testing good
    ... to be good by swapping with other machines and diag softw. ... Tried clean install of xp and me - boots fine off of install cd, but computer resets when trying to ... Is it possible for the MB or CPU to not be able to address one bit of good RAM out of entire ... All components are eliminated as possible causes except - MB, CPU, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)